They Call It "The Cupola" - Smarter Every Day 303

Hey, it's me, Destin. Welcome back to Smarter Every Day. I'm very excited to share this video with you because it means a lot to me to see how it's all played out. Years ago, I met a guy named Don Pettit. Don is an astronaut, and he is an incredibly curious person, a childlike love for the unknown and discovery, and he's just an amazing guy to talk to. Well, Don and I have talked over the years and done some experiments together, and I've learned through the years that he is the mentor astronaut for a guy named Matthew Dominic. Now, the schedules have lined up so that Don Pettit and Matthew Dominic are in space at the same time. And that's special because it's not often that a mentor astronaut will fly with their mentee. So this little overlap in time is a very specific moment that I wanted to capture. And so I wanted to do an interview with them.

Now, what's so special about this interview is Don and Matthew are both accomplished photographers, well respected for their ability to take incredible photos from space. And we're going to get to do an interview with them in the cupola. It's awesome. It's like we're in the cupola with them. We're squished in there and there's elbow room only. And so you feel like you're up in the cupola, and we get to see what it's like to take photos from space. And on top of that, you got their relationship, and you can tell that they're just so happy to be there. So this is a really special interview, and I hope you enjoy it. I'm really excited that at some moments in there, I was able to talk them into letting the camera float around. That just adds to the weightlessness feel. I just love it. So all right, let's go to the space station, and let's talk to Don Pettit and Matthew Dominic, and learn how to take photos from space.

Okay, we're about to connect to the space station. We're going to see Matthew and Don. We're going to see what's going on up in the cupola. [Mission Control] 10 seconds. Standby for that call. [Matt] We're ready for the event. How's it going, guys? Check, check. Going great. How do you hear us? Lima, Charlie. [Don] We hear you loud and clear, even through the vacuum of space. [Destin Chuckling] [D] That's quite the— [M] Loving life hanging out the couple with Don. Check it out the view. [D] That's quite the setup you have there. I just figured our delay out, so I'm going to have to be quiet after I say something. I am noticing that you've got really good exposure on what looks to be night going away. Is that correct? [M] Absolutely, yeah. Just a couple of minutes ago, one of my favorite things happened. The sun just rose up in front of us, and we went through dramatic lighting changes. We actually had the shutter over here in front of us on this side. We had closed, so we weren't burning our eyeballs out. Then just before you called, we were able to open it up as the sun went down on the other side of the space station. Yeah, the dynamic lighting is pretty impressive.

[D] I'm going to level with you. This is what's going on here. I saw the interview you did with Scientific American in the cupola, Matt. I thought it was incredible. I happen to know that you guys are actual real-life on-Earth friends. The fact that you are together in space and you're both astrophotographers, this is just the coolest thing, and you both look like kids in a candy store. Is it as cool to be there together as I hoped it would be for you? [Don] Yeah. Sometimes we have to focus on what the mission is and not what we would like to charge off and do. [M] It's been an absolute blast up here. We have our jobs that we do during the day that we're supposed to do, and we actually do do them. But going off and hopping into the cupola and taking pictures or learning a lot of stuff from Don. Before I launched, Don and I spent a lot of time in his backyard, and he was explaining some of the things you need to know, or I'd borrow a camera, and Don would show me a few things on the camera and give me a head start. It's awesome that just the way things worked out, Don's up here on the space station, and we're having a blast.

[D] Just so everybody understands, it's my understanding that Don, you are Matthew's astronaut mentor, and so you had to teach him all the little astronaut things that little astronauts learn to do when they first learned to astronaut. [Destin breaks out laughing] [Don] We end up teaching each other because Matthew's got these amazing skills that he came in from his background, and we're like two stones that are rubbing the angular edges off as we go through life. It's a blast learning from Don. We both have the same giant curiosity about the world around us. We both have different backgrounds, but the same immense set of childhood curiosity about everything around us.

[D] What I want to know... Yeah, go ahead, Don. [Don] Hold it, but childhood curiosity, some of us haven't even grown up yet. [D] It's an open secret in the whole NASA community that, Don, you've had a list that you've been writing to take up to the station for a really, really long time. My question is, Matthew, have you gotten to see the list of the little experiments he's going to do in his off time? [M] Saturday morning science is going to be amazing. Don's got a lot of cool experiments lined up. I've seen just a glimpse, but I think the whole world is going to grow and learn from what he's going to do up here. [D] That's awesome. With your permission... Go ahead, Don. [Don] I was just going to say the best is yet to be. I think that has something to do with Shakespeare, but it also applies to orbit.

[D] I'm excited for you guys. Okay, so here's the question. We're in a rare situation where we have two really good photographers in the cupola with a downlink, and you have video cameras there. My question is, do you have the ability to move the camera around the cupola on this little talkie-talk that we're doing here? Matt, I know Don might not be able to do this, but I know you probably figured it out, right? [Don] Yeah, Matt and I had a bet as to whether you were going to ask that, and I thought, No, Destin isn't going to ask that. [D] All right, so with your permission, I want to know, I want to explore the space of the cupola. This is something I've wanted to do my whole life. Don, in fact, I don't know that you remember, the day we met, you were in the mockup of the cupola in building nine. Do you remember that? [Don] I remember that, and yes, I do. What they do want to point out, the cupola is a pretty tiny, cramped place, and sometimes we've had up to six people in here, but looking at special events. But you need a real wide-angle lens in order to gather the scope of what's going on here. The video camera we have, we've got a wide-angle adapter on it, but it is not the same field of view that you can get on a standard mirrorless camera.

[D] Got it. Do you have your Z9 handy? Do you guys have that thing and the wide angle? What wide-angle lens are we talking about? [Don] Okay, we've got this lens is a zoom lens that we use for daytime imagery, and it's fairly slow. It's like an F-F-4-5. This is a 24-millimetre F 1.4 lens. We use this a lot for nighttime imagery. Here is one on a mount... Right here. [D] Oh, yeah. [Don] This is a 50 millimeter F1.2 lens. And It's not an ultra-wide-angle lens. It's kind of considered a normal lens for this format of camera. But man, it really sucks in the light and allows us to do nighttime imagery. [D] Is that a remote shutter you have there? [M] Yeah, exactly. [Don] A cable release.

[M] This is fun to handle a camera. One of the really cool parts I enjoy about using a camera up here is if I need another, I just leave the microphone where it's at. I could just talk into the microphone. It's like I have three hands. But Don and I have been really having a blast with this 50-millimeter lens. It's an F1.2, so it's really fast. Takes in a huge... It's just a giant light bucket, and we've been on different shifts. Don, every morning has been taking pictures of the comet, and then late at night, I've been taking pictures of the comet that we've had going on right now and streaming them down to Mission Control as well. So we've been having a blast doing that.

[D] Okay, so what I want to do is I want to get a feel for the space. You have that wide-angle on the Z9. You have the big boy on the Z9. Can you just flip? Can you turn the camera on and record video of this, of the Z9? Can you record Z9 video while we're talking? [M] We might be able to do something like that later, but the camera we have right now is the XF. We have a camcorder, an XF 705 on a downlink. It's hardwired into the space station. We have a cable running back down into node three, we call it, and that goes into a coder. We're actually on a cable with the camera we're currently using. The Z9s are predominantly our still cameras that we use, and we do have some cool 16-millimeter fisheye lenses. We have an 8-millimeter fisheye lens that we put on the Z9, but we have a little spinny wide-angle attachment that we put on the camera we're currently on. It's actually fun. You can spin it off and you can see the perspective change real time there for the camera we're currently using.

[D] Oh, that's awesome. Oh yeah, that's it. That's really cool. [M] Yeah. See if you can... [Don] You hold the camera. [M] See if you can do a good spin, Don. It's fun to spin it off real nice. There we go. Now you can see this lens spinning off the front of the camera. We have a good time with the tools we have available. [D] Oh, that's great. That's awesome. So there's a few questions I had. When I saw your Scientific American interview, which was great, you were talking about these new filters. And so what I'm wondering, these filters on the window, most of the photos I've seen of the space station, of the Earth, the ground has been blown out. But these filters allow you to be able to see you in the cupola and the Earth, correct? [Don] Yeah. I borrowed an idea that the big boys in Hollywood use when they do filming indoors with windows and brightly-lit scenes outside. You want them all balanced. The intensity is just too great to record with standard equipment. What the big boys do is they put neutral density filters as a thin film over the windows to balance the intensity between the outside and the inside. And that's what we've done here. I talked NASA into cutting some four-stop ND filters to fit the cupola windows, and we can put them up. It takes a few minutes to put them up, but it allows video, balanced video, to be done in the cupola. It's really bright outside. And by cutting the intensity down four stops, four EV, that's a factor of, gosh, 16, right?

[D] It's huge. [Don] It allows you to balance the internal video with the outside. For still cameras, you don't need that because you can put a flash on and you can pump enough light inside the cupola to balance with the sunlit outside. [M] Actually, I think we can quickly demonstrate it. Behind Don right now, we've got filters up over the windows, but we don't have filters on all the windows right now. And if I just turn the camera right here, that window and this window do not have filters on them. So you can see they get a lot brighter just by looking out those two windows. [D] I see, but you're using it to light your faces, which is pretty cool. [Don] One of the things that I try not to do, and that's to overexpose the whites. If you take the whites and blow out the top end of your detector, then there's no detail at all. You see that a lot in photography from orbit with the clouds being blown out. It's really good to at least keep some detail in the brightest part of the region in the clouds.

[D] So your sensor is light sensitive and you have the darker colors and the lighter colors. You're saying you never want your histogram to hit the top. Is that what you're saying? You never want to saturate. Do I understand correctly? [Destin's echo in their speaker] I understand correctly? [Don] Yeah, and I would rather lose detail in the blacks in the low end than to blow detail out in the whites. If you blow detail out in the whites, it's really noticeable. Your eyes tend to get drawn to the brightest region of an image. If there's no detail there and it's just snow, snow, white, that is not as aesthetically pleasing to me as having some detail in the whites. Then the shadows are faded into oblivion, and we're used to seeing that. That's I prefer to balance the exposure across the range of lighting that's there.

[D] So here's what I want to understand. I want to know, I saw a picture of you, Matt. You were taking a picture of the top of the cupola. It was a little video. When you shot the Kilimanjaro shot, you were looking out the big round porthole window up top. What I didn't understand is where were your feet and what were you holding? And were you just having to float there like your microphone? Because you have two hands that are on the camera and you're not anchored. So how are you doing that? [Destin laughing] [M] That's a great question. I can't show you that right now. We got folks down in that other module. But beneath us, there's little handrails and there's little footholds that you can put your feet on. Maybe this is a bit more a little bit more detail, but I actually have one of our JAXA crew mates had Ninja socks, and I still have some of them on board. I have little Ninja socks I could grip things with and that are helpful. But we get to wear socks everywhere we go up here, no shoes, and I'm able to grip things. Or down beneath this, there are little crevices in the walls that you put your feet into. I was thinking about this just the other day. As I was floating around, I was grabbing something with my hands, and I've been up here long enough now that my feet just drift off and they just grab things. It's really interesting. I don't think about it anymore. My feet just grab things that they know where they are, and I use that to stabilize my taking pictures.

[Don] Matthew is right. We would be more advanced as human beings if we had retained our prehensile feet. [D] You need a monkey tail. So you are using your feet below, and you're using the camera above. And how do you know how close... You're not touching the window, I noticed. So you just have an overall understanding of the length of your body, right? Can one of you grab a camera and the other one film how the other one does it? Can we do that? I'm not sure that you guys are capable of doing that, but if you think you are. [M] Sure. Sure. I think we've got the camera stabilized here. It'll say, Look, this is one of those moments, right? You see them holding the camera, the microphone floats or Don readjusted for me. But a lot of times the Earth is moving by so fast that we have to pick a pretty fast shutter speed, or you can also, if it's at night and you're trying to take a picture at night, you actually hand track the Earth as it goes by with the camera to reduce motion blur. It would look something like this. That's daytime right now, but I'll show you what a night shot would look like in the cupola. When you're doing that, you're actually stabilizing on the Earth by looking through the viewfinder. When you're looking through the viewfinder, you can see the Earth, and you look to keep the center crosshairs of the camera on the same spot of Earth to get rid of the motion blur from the Earth, the Earth rotating and or the fact that we're going 17,500 miles an hour to get rid of that. A typical night shot with this new lens we have, we're shooting one over 300 or one over 320th of a second. But even that fast shutter speed, you still see some motion blur on the Earth. We take some of that out by very steadily tracking the camera on the Earth.

[D] So star trails on Earth, Don, when you shoot them, you're going to start to get a little streak in about four seconds, right? [Don] It depends on your lens. With this 50-millimetre lens, if you have an exposure greater than about a fourth of a second, you could see notable streakiness in the stars. If you want pinpoint stars, you got to have a shutter speed with a 50-millimetre lens greater than a fourth of a second. If you intentionally want star streaks, I like to use a 30-second exposure on that and then just do repetitive exposures and then assemble them as an overlay in Photoshop. [D] Are we talking about on Earth or on station? [M] Don is talking about on station. A quarter second on this lens, you're going to see star streaks. Then at a quarter second, because you have the Earth rotation involved, in addition to the space station, you see the city streaks. We really like to shoot cities at night in the 200s or 300s of a second to get rid of the orbital motion. But on Earth, depending on the lens, you can probably go, I can't remember, I haven't done it in a while, but 10, 15 seconds Earth without having to worry about star streaks. It's a big difference. In fact, when I share a lot of... When I've shared a lot of pictures over the past couple of months, I typically write down, Hey, these are the camera settings. One of the most common questions I get is, Why are you shooting such a fast shutter speed? The realization of our orbital speed impacting that, people come to realize it's a lot. We shot a hurricane picture at one over 32,000ths of a second, and it turned out to be a great picture.

[D] Your camera has been still too long. Can you just somewhere else? It's just the shots. I just need to see some movement. No, no, the video camera. Can you show me something else? I want to see the cupola. [M] Got you. I put it on a mount. To give you a sense of what's going on in our world and how tight a space we're in, Don and I are packed in the cupola right now, and I'm moving my feet around while I'm talking to you around somebody who's doing bench press beneath me. Somebody is on a bench press, and they just put their feet out on the bench, and I'm moving my feet around them as they maneuver we're doing what we would call weight lifting, but you were pulling against a vacuum. That's how tight a quarters we're in right now.

[D] It's on ARED? Are we allowed to know who it is, or is it their private time? [Don] Okay, here we go. You can see now how Earth is... The camera is adjusting to Earth, but then look at me, I'm in a shadow. If I go down like this, now I'm properly exposed because we have it on auto exposure. Then I come up here and you can see Earth is all washed out. But if you keep yourself within the confines of the neutral density filters we've put up, you can see that the camera is doing a pretty decent job at 4F stop reduction of balancing the intensity of the light both inside and out.

[M] Let me do this. Is he still there? [D] Yeah, I'm still here. Can you show me the... Oh, that's a great shot. That looks awesome. Can you show me how the shutters work? Did we lose you? Yeah, can I see a closeup of the handle? Like that handle? Because one of the first conversations you and I had done was about that handle, and there's a seal there. [M] There you. Yeah, Don is going to go ahead and open the handle of the top shutter, window 7, we call it. There's the crank. One of the first things I noticed when I came up here was this is a mechanical device opening a window or a shutter that just opens up the world to the vacuum of space. There's this through that little thing, through the mechanical seals that are in there, straight to the space. We're lucky enough just to get to sit in here and see that shot right there. Don, you're looking good.

[D] You do look good, Don. [Don] Yeah, that's because I put on a clean shirt for this interview, Destin, just for you. [D] Oh, thanks, Don. I appreciate that. What am I looking at there? What spacecraft is that? [M] Here. Got you. All right, we'll give you the quick tour around the bend here. This is our Cygnus spacecraft. This brings up so much cool cargo for us in science and payloads and food and ice cream. In fact, this ice cream and the shirt that Don's wearing came up with this spacecraft. We reached out and grabbed that spacecraft with this robotic arm. It came, flew up, it hovered. The spacecraft was hovering right out here. That's actually the solar panel from Cygnus, and it was hovering right out here. We reached out with the arm and we grabbed it and then connected the space station right there. Don's ride up to the space station, that's the Soyuz right there. Soyuz docked our other crew, was out there on that other module on the Ume that undocked a couple of weeks ago, but Don's ride to space station is the Soyuz right there. I'm going to try not to make you sick and flip you around and look at Earth and then flip straightforward down to the front part of the space station. And way out there on the front of the space station as we're zipping around Earth is Dragon. That's crew nine. That's the crew that just arrived about a week ago. And on the top side that you can't see is crew 8. We can spin around and we can see some experiments out there on the Japanese module. And we can see radars and our solar panel is doing good work charging our and running our whole space station.

I'm actually enjoying watching the camera adapt to each one of these settings here as it goes through. You can see how we point into the darkness inside the cupola and then Earth, and it just has to adjust really quick just how bright the Earth is. But this is one of the cool windows. There's not always a lot of structure out this window, and then flip around, and that gives you the full tour of the space that we have here on the out the window look from the Russian segment on the Aft part of the space station up to the front of the space station. And then Don gets to sit right here and talk to you about it.

[Don] The cupola is less than 6 feet in diameter. If I stretch my arms out, I can reach 6 feet, and I can more than reach the whole cross-sectional diameter of the cupola. It's a pretty tight space. [D] Don, question for you. How do you feel like a young astronaut, Padawan Matt, has done with the teaching that you gave him? What do you think about the shot he got, the high altitude event? [M] A picture of which picture? Did you say? The Sprite? [D] Yeah, the Sprite. That's what it was. Thank you. What do you think about Matt's picture of the Sprite? What do you think about Matt's picture of the Sprite?

[Don] Oh, man, that was amazing to catch a Sprite on edge. You could see structure in the Sprite from space. The structure is commensurate to what people could see from Earth. What I want to do in terms of Sprite hunting is to get a nadir view straight down on a Sprite. So both Matthew and I have been shooting nadir with about a 200 millimeter telephoto lens to try to catch a straight down nadir view of a Sprite. We haven't caught one yet, but we've probably taken 50,000 pictures of the tops of dark clouds. But one of these times we're going to catch a nadir view of a Sprite.

[M] It's going to be awesome. [D] To be clear, a nadir view is orthogonal to the surface of the Earth out of window seven there. Is that correct? [M] It would be right down that way. We've been shooting straight down out that window, and then I've been shooting out towards the front. We look at the map and we look at the weather for where we're going to be, and we're able to identify where there's going to be thunderstorms. We target thunderstorms that are right after sunset so that they have the most energy in them. You want to have all that energy from the sun during the day built up in the Earth, and that creates the most energetic thunderstorms, and we target those. Then we're just trying to shoot a lot to try and capture this event. You can either shoot by maybe setting up an intervalometer, but of the camera only half a second. We've been using the remote shutter. The remote shutter has a lock feature, and so you can fire off a shot that's every... If you're shooting maybe a 50th or a 60th of a second exposure, we can lock it down so we have five milliseconds in between. So you're just shooting. You'll crack out maybe 2,000 or 3,000 images in a short period of time.

[D] Matt, you're about to leave, man. We've got just a little bit of time here before comm loss, but my question for you is, this is the cupola. This has been your spot for six months now, your first time flown astronaut. What do you feel sitting in that room right there with that guy right beside you? What are you feeling right now, knowing you're about to go home? [M] So many feelings. I'm grateful. Don and I spent a lot of time before flight talking about things, and Don gave me lots of great advice from just how to fly in space, what the problems you're going to have, or just about photography and what you need to do. And one of the things Don had me do before flight, and I took it on, was I would check out these cameras. NASA is really nice. They let us check out the cameras, and I practiced a lot. So that paid off. So practice paid off up here. But things that I'm feeling are obviously grateful that Don showed me those ways of what to do and how to get there. And then I feel an immense sense of responsibility as well. I remember coming in, floating into the cupola for the first time six plus months ago and just looking outside and thinking that I had some responsibility to take as many pictures as possible to capture what my eyes have seen to share with the world. This is an insane view. I don't think I've got there yet. I think I got a lot of ways to go, but it's really hard.

[Don] And what a mission to have to try to take as many pictures as you possibly can. [M] We've clogged up the downlink a little bit. The KU bandwidth we have, the satellite bandwidth, has limited by how many pictures we've taken up here trying to capture that. [D] When you get back, I'd like to just have a couple of your minutes to find out what your favorite picture was or one of them. But before we leave, I just want to say there's another Don that we should recognize, and that's your dad. Your dad has a long history of this stuff, right, Matt? Your dad's name is Donald, too, right? He sent me an email about the new lenses and stuff you got. Yeah. Yeah. [M] No, my dad was a photographer. He was a photographer in the US Air Force and then continued that career doing local production and direction. And so, Don Pettit has pointed out that I know a little bit about composition and setting up a photo. And I think a lot of that came from watching my dad set up photos and looking at some of the photos my dad did, some of that intuition about how to quickly pick up a camera, point and shoot to capture a moment. Sometimes up here, you just don't have a lot of time. I remember one time I was up here with Mike Barrett was shooting, and the moon looked just right. I ended up pulling out this 50 to 500, quickly throwing in a card, resetting the camera, and shooting the moon over Mike Barrett's shoulder in just a couple of seconds. I think that intuition for composition comes from a young age of doing it and watching my dad doing it. So thank you to my father for that one.

[D] Dons are important. I just want to say I think we're about to lose comms, guys. Thank you so much for your time. I just wanted, if I'm honest, I wanted to capture video of you two in space together because I love it. And anybody that's ever interacted with you knows how special this is. So thank you for your time. I really appreciate it. And Don, I'm looking forward to seeing all the things you do on orbit. [Don] Yeah, like I said, the best is yet to be. [D] I really want to know what that means, but I'm looking forward to it. [M] Thank you so much for the interview. I much appreciate it. [D] Thank you, gentlemen. I appreciate you. You're great, guys. Thank you, Mission Control. I'm grateful for your time.

[Mission Control] Destin, that was fabulous. That was so much fun! All right. That was an awesome interview. It was a full circle moment for me having met Don in a mockup of the cupola and then getting to talk to him in the cupola. That was really, really cool. These guys are on social media. If you want to follow them and get their photos, I'll leave their handles down in the video description, just follow them, man. It's a really cool timeline cleanse for whatever's on your algorithm. You get to see really cool pictures from space, and they're interesting people. So go check that out. Also, you can follow NASA @NASAastronauts. That's really cool. I have a thing that I do that I think you might find interesting. It's called @WhoIsInSpace a guy named Jeff and I, we post all kinds of stuff from people that are in space at any moment in time. So I'll leave that handle down below as well. You can also check it out at whoisinspace.com.

When Don went to the space station, that was a new record for how many people were in orbit around the Earth. 19. That was a big deal. So you could just go to whoisinspace.com and you could see everybody that's in space at any given moment, whether they're Russian or Chinese or European Space Agency, Canada, US, whatever. It's all up there at whoisinspace.com. I think you'll really enjoy that. One more thing. There's a Smarter Every Day thing I'd like to tell you about. It's a Patreon. I have a Patreon account. And basically what that is, it's like a goodwill engine. If you enjoy Smarter Every Day and you appreciate what I do and you see what I'm going for here and you're like, Man, I want Destin to be able to keep doing this and not have to worry about sponsors or anything like that. For people that like that and they want to pitch in, they go to Patreon.com/smartereveryday and they just kick in. I'm grateful to everybody that does that.

But one of the cool things we do every year is there is a Smarter Every Day sticker team, where I thank people for sticking with me on Patreon. So the way that works is every year, I physically mail a sticker to your house if you are a supporter at Patreon.com/smartereveryday. So that was the Supersonic Baseball team. One year we had the James Webb Space Telescope space team, and last year we had the Exploration team. This year we're working on the sticker for the sticker team. And if you are a patron, you can suggest what the sticker team is this year. So there's a post on Patreon. Go check it out, and I will physically mail a sticker to your house. And the cool thing about it is it's like a little club, and you get it the year that you support. So if you've never done it before, this is a great year to jump in on the sticker team. It's going to be really fun.

So thank you to everybody that supports on Patreon. I'm grateful. And yeah, I'm honored that you would spend time watching my videos. I put a lot of time into them, and I enjoy it. So I think that's everything. So feel free to subscribe to Smarter Every Day if you want to. If not, no big deal. I'm just grateful that you're here. That's it. I'm Destin. You're getting Smarter Every Day. Have a good one, bye.