Space Station Lookout
			
		
		
			Image Credit & Copyright:  
Chris Hadfield 
(CSA);
 Annotation assistance:  Vincent Berseth
		
		
			If you glanced out a side window of the International Space Station, what might you see?
If you were Expedition 34 flight engineer 
Chris Hadfield, 
and you were looking out one of windows of 
Japan's 
Kibo Research Module on February 26, you might have seen the 
above vista.
In the distance lies the 
darkness 
of outer space and the 
blueness of planet Earth.
Large ISS objects include long 
solar panels 
that stretch diagonally from the upper left and the cylindrical airlock of the 
Pressurized Module that occupies the lower right.
Numerous ports and platforms of the space station are 
visible and labeled on an 
annotated companion image.
Of particular note is what looks to be a 
washer - dryer pair toward the image left, which are really 
NASA's 
HREP (near) and 
JAXA's 
MCE (far) research platforms.
The gold foil covered experiment in the rear of HREP is the 
Remote Atmospheric and Ionospheric Detection System (RAIDS) 
that monitors atmospheric airglow, while MCE includes the 
Global Lightning and Sprite Measurements (JEM-GLIMS) instrument that monitors atmospheric electrical discharges.
The current Expedition 35 
crew is now commanded by Colonel Hadfield and scheduled to stay aboard the space station until May.