ISS, December 22. /TASS/. TASS special correspondent aboard the International Space Station (ISS), Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergey Kud-Sverchkov, shared footage of Earth during the longest night of the year in the Northern Hemisphere, noting that from orbit, the "night" lasts only about 40 minutes.
"On the footage, you see only one of the 16 night passes the ISS makes in 24 hours. While Earth completes a single rotation on its axis, the ISS orbits the planet 16 times. Each orbit takes 90 minutes, so light and dark alternate roughly every hour and a half. The dark part of the orbit lasts around 40 minutes," the cosmonaut explained.
He added that the footage begins with cities in Southeast Asia, then shows the bright lights of China, and ends with the aurora over the north of Eastern Siberia and sunrise over the Primorsky Region.
On December 21, the winter solstice marked the longest night in the Northern Hemisphere. In Moscow, night lasted 17 hours and day seven hours. The shortest day in Russia was in the town of Polyarnye Zori in the Murmansk Region, in Russia’s North-West, lasting just 18 minutes, while the longest was in Derbent in Russia’s North Caucasus region of Dagestan, lasting nine hours and seven minutes.