“One day, I watched the sun setting forty-four times……You know…when one is so terribly sad, one loves sunsets.” ~ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

NASA astronauts at the International Space Stations (ISS) must never feel sad.  The ISS travels at a  pace of 17,100 miles per hour, which means that it orbits Earth every ninety minutes.  So the astronauts witness a sunrise every ninety minutes.  They witness a total of sixteen sunrises and sixteen sunsets a day.

I wonder if they ever tire of seeing this?

Fiery South Atlantic Sunset | Photo by NASA

I love sunrises and sunsets.  It is rare that I get to wake up early enough to witness a sunrise, but I do have a large collection of sunrise photos.  Here are a few:

Sunrise over the Bronx

I have a lot more, and today I decided to organize all my photos.  They are scattered and saved everywhere, but as I was looking through the thousands of photos that I’ve taken over the years between my phone and real camera, I realized that a good portion of the photos I take involve some sort of sunrise or sunset.  Imagine if I was a NASA astronaut – I would be taking at least 32 photos a day, and I would never feel sad.