This beautiful video of Earth from the International Space Station is your relaxing moment of the day

On his fourth trip to orbit, NASA astronaut Don Pettit has shared some wonderful images captured from the International Space Station (ISS) since his arrival there in September 2024.

His latest work shows distant stars, city lights on Earth about 155 miles, and what he describes as cosmic fireflies, but are actually Starlink Internet satellites deployed by Elon Musk’s company SpaceX.

As Pettit points out on Twitter, the flashes of light are sunlight reflecting off the small Starlink satellites as they orbit the Earth more than 100 miles above the space station.

Cosmic fireflies. Actually, these are Starlink satellites momentarily flashing sunlight towards @Space_Station. pic.twitter.com/rOKUdLlP3f

— Don Pettit (@astro_Pettit) December 1, 2024

Almost 7,000 Starlink satellites in five years

After the deployment of the first Starlink satellites in 2019, SpaceX has already sent more than 6,700 to low Earth orbit. It currently has permission to deploy up to 12,000 of the satellites, but its goal is to send up to 42,000 into orbit.

This means that the number of satellite sightings from the ISS will only increase in the coming years, at an even greater rate than currently, considering that other companies like Amazon also want to send small satellites into orbit as part of their own Internet initiatives from space.

And not only astronauts can see SpaceX satellites. Astronomers have long complained that the sunlight reflecting off Starlink satellites interferes with their ability to use ground-based telescopes to view deep space.

In fact, the problem seems to have worsened since SpaceX began deploying the new V2 version of the Starlink satellite in February of last year, and disturbances in radio astronomical observations due to electromagnetic radiation emitted by the satellites have also been reported.

With SpaceX launching about 40 second-generation Starlink satellites each week, astronomers have warned that the problem is becoming increasingly serious.

SpaceX has been working to address the concerns of astronomers, but despite the efforts, some astronomers remain skeptical about the effectiveness of these measures, particularly for radio astronomy.