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This is the breathtaking picture that NASA astronaut Christina Koch took Wednesday from her privileged position at the International Space Station (ISS).
On board the Soyuz MS-15 (Expedition 61) spacecraft bound for the ISS, which had taken off from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, was her best friend, NASA flight engineer Jessica Meir. Oleg Skripochka from Roscosmos (Russian Space Agency) and Hazzaa Ali Almansoori, the first United Arab Emirates (UAE) astronaut to travel in space, accompanied Meir.
As Koch explains in his tweet, the amazing photo shows the trajectory of the current second stage, while the wavy smoke is a remnant of takeoff.
The images taken by people on the ground in Kazakhstan also show the unknown shape of the path taken by the rocket as it made its way to the ISS.
Koch, who is not new in taking stunning photographs of space, has decreased the exposure of his camera to capture the particular visual effect. This is also why no star is visible, as others have noticed in the comments.
The Soyuz docked properly at the ISS at 15:42. EDT the same day as the launch.
Almansoori will only spend eight days at the ISS before returning to Earth. The launch marked the last time that the departure of Gagarin, the launching pad where Yuri Gagarin took off April 12, 1961 to become the first human to fly in space, had been used before an upgrade.
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