From the ground, the night sky can feel limitless, but it's also filtered through a blanket of air that softens and scatters starlight. From orbit, that veil drops away, as astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) saw firsthand on Nov 28, 2025. They were treated to a view of the phenomenon called airglow, along with a glimpse of one of the Milky Way's closest galactic neighbors. A member of the ISS' Expedition 73 crew captured the image with a Nikon Z9 camera with a 50-millimeter focal length.
The bright, blurry patch near the center of the image is the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a dwarf galaxy located about 160,000 light-years from Earth. It's close enough to be a familiar sight to skywatchers in the Southern Hemisphere, where it appears as a pale smudge to the naked eye.
