A short show of intense beauty that only a few astronauts have had the pleasure to view is ours to marvel at, thanks to Andy Revkin over at DotEarth.
He has a fine video clip of the aurora borealis, which Don Pettit stitched together from photographs he took from space. I think this counts as geojournalism.
It must feel so good to get up there in space, far above the pollution and the sounds of the city, and way too high to remember where borders lie.
To see the planet turning silently in the endless space, onwards ever onwards, must be a reminder that we who claim to rule it are truly just momentary upstarts who take ourselves far too seriously.
Why is it that we hear so little about what astronauts feel when they make it into space and when they return home again?
They fall to Earth as citizens of competing nation states once more, just days after having surveyed the entire spinning planet like gods from above.
That has to be strange, beautiful, heartbreaking and mindbending, but it is a story I don’t hear being told.
With our planet in the state it is in, maybe it is time for the astronauts from all nations to get better at sharing the wonder the rest of us are unlikely ever to experience first-hand.
