ISS Timelapse - Attitude Change after Cygnus XL Reboost (26 Sep 2026)

Описание: Camera setup by Anil Menon

Original timelapse by Riccardo Rossi (ISAA - Italian Space and Astronautics Association) - CC-BY 4.0 License -

Raw photos courtesy of the Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit, NASA Johnson Space Center
http://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/ ID from ISS075-E-177625 to ISS075-E-183026

Music: Labyrinthine Dreams by Igor Pumphonia - CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 License -
https://www.jamendo.com/track/2325675...

Using about 5,400 photographs taken from the International Space Station by Anil Menon last September 26, we created this #timelapse.

This is a sequence covering an entire orbit, filmed from one of the windows of the Crew Dragon Freedom; Anil wanted to highlight an event that happens every now and then, namely a radical change in the Station’s attitude (orientation).

Even though it is in space, the ISS gradually loses altitude due to its very faint interaction with Earth’s atmosphere, so it periodically performs engine burns to climb back up a bit. The Station has its own engines to carry out these “reboosts”, but it can also make use of the vehicles docked to it; in this case, the Cygnus XL was chosen.

To optimize the Cygnus’s thrust, it was preferable to rotate the Station by 180°; in this timelapse you see the Station returning to its standard configuration after performing the reboost.

Note that stars are only visible when the Station is on the night side of the Earth and the camera settings allow both the ground and the sky to be correctly exposed. During the day, on the other hand, the surface is too bright, and to avoid “burning out” the shots, the exposure time and ISO sensitivity are adjusted accordingly; this makes the sky completely black (except for the Moon, visible at the end of the sequence).

Also, be careful not to mistake the camera sensor’s hot pixels (static bright dots) for actual stars, which instead move in accordance with the #ISS’s motion.

The video covers a 90 minutes time span and is therefore sped up about 20 times compared to the actual speed of the Station.

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