The sun never sets in a new video taken by a space traveler aboard the International Space Station (ISS).
The space station orbits around the Earth once every 92 minutes in its journey around our planet.
Reid Wiseman recorded the first Vine video from space, filming the Earth during one entire orbit. The 92 minutes are compressed to a mere six seconds. One of the most distinctive aspects of the ultra-short film is the position of the sun. Our companion star never sets in the film, making a circle around the frame of the movie.
"1st Vine from space! Single Earth orbit. Sun never sets flying parallel w/terminator line," Wiseman wrote in the description on Vine.com.
Space travelers aboard the ISS can see 16 sunrises and sunsets each day. However, the view is most unusual when the station passes over the terminator (the line between day and night). At these times, our companion sun never rises or sets as seen from the ISS, but instead turns in a leisurely circle over an hour and a half.
Rick Wiseman was born in 1975, in Baltimore, Maryland. The astronaut earned his undergraduate degree in computer and systems engineering, from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, located in Troy, New York, in 1997. In 2006, he graduated from John Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, with a masters of science degree in systems engineering. Wiseman joined NASA in 2009 and completed their astronaut training program in 2011.
On 29 May, 2014, Wiseman took off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan and headed towards the International Space Station. There, he is currently serving as a flight engineer as part of the newest crew.
The six-second video went viral on social media, after being posted on Twitter with the hashtage #ISS and #Exp40 (signifying the crew of Expedition 40 still aboard the orbiting outpost).
Vine allows users to post short, looping videos in a wide range of categories. These can then be shared on the Web, tablets and smartphones. The videos are required to have a maximum length of six seconds. The company was founded in June 2012. Just four months later, it was bought out by Twitter. The service quickly became the most-used video sharing application for iOS.
Along with Wiseman, the Expedition 40 crew includes Commander Steve Swanson, Flight Engineers Maxim Suraev, Alexander Skvortsov, Oleg Artemyev, and Alexander Gerst. The six-person crew launched to the station aboard two rockets.
Wiseman and the rest of the Expedition 40 crew are due to return to Earth in November 2014.
