Amazing Timelapse: Watch the Milky Way Spin Above the Space Station

By Nancy Atkinson - September 24, 2014 at 4:03 PM UTC | Milky Way

Have you ever sat outside on a starry night and just watched the stars move slowly above you? Here's a video that shows what it is like to sit back on a spaceship and gaze at the ever-changing sky above.

This timelapse was compiled from recent images taken from the International Space Station. Hugh Carrick-Allan, a 3D Animator/VFX artist living in Sydney Australia used a sequence of 52 images posted on the NASA Crew Earth Observation website. The video also features the Aurora Australis and and some random satellites.

He also created the beautiful image below by combining all 52 the images.

"I used DeepSkyStacker to stack the images, I used PixInsight for some heavy noise reduction on the foreground, and then I combined and tweaked everything in Photoshop," Carrick-Allan

wrote on his website.

Nancy Atkinson

Nancy Atkinson is a space journalist and author with a passion for telling the stories of people involved in space exploration and astronomy. She is currently retired from daily writing, but worked at Universe Today for 20 years as a writer and editor. She also contributed articles to The Planetary Society, Ad Astra (National Space Society), New Scientist and many other online outlets.

Her 2019 book, "Eight Years to the Moon: The History of the Apollo Missions,” shares the untold stories of engineers and scientists who worked behind the scenes to make the Apollo program so successful, despite the daunting odds against it. Her first book “Incredible Stories From Space: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Missions Changing Our View of the Cosmos” (2016) tells the stories of 37 scientists and engineers that work on several current NASA robotic missions to explore the solar system and beyond.

Nancy is also a NASA/JPL Solar System Ambassador, and through this program, she has the opportunity to share her passion of space and astronomy with children and adults through presentations and programs. Nancy's personal website is nancyatkinson.com