Astronaut Scientific Debriefings, 1962-1963

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Solar Corona. No. This--once again I think to observe these things properly we are going to have to be night adapted before we get there and that's what we lost by having other complications on the second __.

To get back to the unanticipated celestial features.

Well, unanticipated celestial features--the little light spots, luminous spots that I saw--I don't think these are celestial features. I don't know what they are. Can we get back to that later?

Uh huh.

celestial

I think unanticipated/features, another one to do with sunset is that the sunset lasted--the lightness much longer than I had anticipated. This went on for some 4 or 5 minutes that you could still see bright bands and then they would gradually go to a more dim condition but this occurred--this was over some quite lengthy lengthy period of time--about 5 minutes. I had expected the light to just go down very shortly after sunset. But it didn't, it was quite brilliant, quite bright for a long period of time.

Would you concentrate on __. It would be a concentration over the horizon but were there many __?

No. Another unanticipated celestial thing at night though was this cloud that I described, the haze layer or whatever it is. I notice this at first because as the stars were coming down toward the horizon they move rather rapidly down toward the horizon at first. I was watching one particular star and it got rather dim and I thought well its going behind the horizon and then it got brighter again as it came down closer to the horizon and then went out of sight. Well then when I looked very carefully I could see here is a band that was some--I think we estimated about 6 to 8 degrees above the horizon and was