Vine is a social network that exists mostly to show us short clips of dogs and Will Sasso vomiting up citrus. But it can also be used for sheer beauty, as the first Vine from space shows us.
Courtesy of Reid Wiseman, it’s a simple time-lapse of the sun as viewed from the International Space Station. Of course, since the ISS is in space, that means the sun moves in unusual ways.
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Weisman is something of a shutterbug, as his Twitter feed attests. For those curious, the effect of the sun “circling” in the frame is thanks to the physics of the ISS. It’s designed to fly parallel to the terminator, the boundary between day and night as the Earth rotates. This is for both safety reasons, as being on the dark side of Earth means you lose heat fast in space, and for powering reasons, as solar panels need, well, solar energy to run the station. The weird movement of the sun is just a nice bonus.
We hope this is a trend. We already get tweets and YouTube videos from space, after all. But Vine seems well suited for communicating the sheer beauty of space in ways we haven’t thought of before. Just no selfies, guys, we’ve got enough of those.