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"It is spectacular. It's amazing to hold onto the International Space Station, you're going seventeen and a half thousand miles an hour, and just sort of look down at your feet and 200 miles under your feet, there goes the coast of California and, oops, nine minutes later, there goes New York City as you're flying over and then on your way to Europe." -Dan Tani, Astronaut ("In Their Own Words")






Photographing the Earth from the International Space Station

Metadata: TILT field

Tilt is the calculated look angle away from a straight nadir (straight down below the spacecraft) view. If the tilt exceeds a certain angle, 55 degrees, then "HO" in the TILT field indicates that the look angle is very oblique and the horizon is probably visible. Although the field is now calculated from the spacecraft location data whenever it is available, it was input by hand for many years. When the cataloger looks at the image, they indicate that the horizon was visible, by entering "PAN-" at the beginning of the feature field. If "PAN-" is at the beginning of the feature field, then the tilt field is constrained to be "HO."