Daily Telescope: A colorful star trail through the largest window in space

Enlarge / Cities on Earth shine alongside distant stars. (credit: Don Pettit/reddit)

Welcome to the Daily Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light, a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We’ll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we’re going to take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.

Good morning. It’s March 19, and today’s photo comes from the International Space Station. NASA astronaut Don Pettit captured it during his most recent visit to the orbiting laboratory in 2012.

After sharing the photo online this weekend, Pettit described how he captured this effect: