With all this eclipse business, I’ve been wondering how astronauts deal with having the unfiltered sun right out their window.
Specifically, the glasses for looking at the eclipse are so dark you can’t see anything else besides the sun. But clearly astronauts have work to do that can’t be done through a nearly opaque filter.
Or am I overthinking this and they deal with the sun the same way we do on Earth …not staring at it like an idiot?
Astronaut Clayton C. Anderson has this to say about it:
Now that the question has been answered:
They wait until it’s night, obviously. 
I have the Sun right out my window right now, too. I just don’t look at it. Granted, the Sun I see is filtered through the thickness of the atmosphere, but that’s really not all that much of a filter.
They can always maneuver their craft so the earth or moon is always between them and the sun. Sort or a continuous eclipse.
On a related topic, would someone above North America on Monday be able see a neat, round shadow process across the continent? Will our folks in the ISS be able to see it?
While a clear sky only attenuates incident sunlight to about 70% of the value in Earth orbit, the air mass of the atmosphere filters over over 80% of harmful UV, including nearly everything below 300 nm thanks to the ozone layer. Filtering light is fairly trivial, of course, by simply using sunshields and faceplate filters; the bigger challenge is dealing with all of the thermal energy produced by incident sunlight without the atmosphere to cool via convection, which requires using reflective solar shields and active cooling systems to radiate heat on the back side.
They can certainly see the eclipse shadow (umbra) although it will not be distinct as it will be surronded by the penumbra in the partial eclipse region.
Stranger
Yes, there are videos on YouTube taken from aircraft and sped up. Very neat. I’ll see if I can find one and post a link.
Round, but not sharp-edged. The sun is just huge, so light from around the “edges” will smudge the shadow… the “penumbra” that surrounds the “umbra”.
Example: 1999 total eclipse photographed from Mir.
Here’s a GIF animation from our own Bad Astronomer Phl Plait.
This is not the video I saw the other day, but it’s not bad.
NASA has a really cool orbiter called EPIC that hangs at the L1 point between Earth & Sun. Every few minutes it takes pictures of the day side of the Earth as it rotates beneath the camera. You can watch the daily slideshow here: https://epic.gsfc.nasa.gov/. I visit most days and follow the progress of the seasons and major weather features.
A couple years ago it filmed an eclipse crossing the earth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLCl53FY90I I’d expect Monday’s event to look similar from space. Now this is taken from nearly 1 million miles from Earth, whereas the ISS is roughly 250 miles from Earth. So they’ll see a much different perspective on the same thing.
I hope you’re kidding. Just in case you’re not …
If you’re in Earth orbit you’re going around the Earth between day and night continuously. In the case of ISS and other things in low Earth orbit it’s roughly 45 minutes in day, 45 minutes in night, 45 minutes in day, 45 minutes in night for as long as they remain in orbit. They might be able to control which way their vehicle is pointing, but they can’t prevent it cycling between day and night like that. Not even a little bit.
Things in higher Earth orbits have longer day/night cycles. The famous geo-stationary communication and video broadcast satellites are on a 12 hour day, 12 hour night cycle just like we are down here. That’s why they appear to us to hover in a single spot in the sky. Which makes it real easy to point your DirecTV or Dish network satellite dish at them since they’re not a moving target.
Something closely orbiting the Moon, such as the Apollo command modules, alternated between the day & night side of the Moon very roughly once per hour. 60 minutes of day, 60 minutes of night, lather rinse repeat.
Absent other considerations, they can certainly arrange to point the vehicle so the part they’re working on is in the shade of the vehicle itself. That brings its own challenges because just like space is real bright in the direct sunlight, it’s real dark in the shade. There’s just no in-between. As well, other considerations almost always rule which way the vehicle is pointed. So the work gets done in whatever combo of sun and shade happens to be there.
The early Apollo Astronauts on the moon complained that during sleep times the shades on the LM, did not provide sufficient darkness for sleeping.
Nm oops
No matter what the lighting conditions, if I’m the friggin’ First Man on the Moon, I’m gonna find it tough to sleep.
To expand slightly on this, there is exactly one place you can always keep the Earth between you and the Sun with only a slight expenditure of thrust. But it’s very far out, further than humans have ever gone.
Me too. I guess I don’t have The Right Stuff.
Um…no. They can certainly maneuver their craft so that the craft itself is blocking the sun - but they’re not going to just casually maneuver around the entire planet.
When Neil Armstrong died the Economist magazine published an obit on him. The photo was of him aboard the LM on the moon late in their lunar visit. I don’t recall the exact words they used to describe the photo, but I think they said “elated and exhausted”. I also saw loaded on adrenalin & maybe a bit of issue amphetamine. His face showed the happiest [del]guy on Earth[/del] living human having a very sleepless but very peak experience.
All in all it was a touching piece of journalism about a really neat person.
Ref L2* … Unfortunately the specific setup of Earth & Sun means L2 isn’t *quite *a total eclipse. But it’s close: Lagrange point - Wikipedia
What’s sorta fun to me is the fact that we can produce a fairly close orbit around the Earth that experiences perpetual day, but not one that has perpetual night. That asymmetry is both obvious with a little thought but perpelexing at first glance. Sun-synchronous orbit - Wikipedia and dawn/dusk orbits.
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There’s more than one place you can go to keep earth between you and the sun, but for all the other places, you need a shovel.
