Anil Menon pointed a camera out of the International Space Station on September 20, 2026, left the shutter open, and let orbital mechanics do the rest. The result is a long-duration exposure that turns the fixed stars into concentric arcs — the classic star-trail effect — while 258 miles below, the Banda Sea glows with the blue bioluminescence-mimicking lights of Indonesian fishing fleets and the amber sprawl of coastal cities. The image works because of a tension most star-trail photographs don't have. Normally the ground is dark ballast — a silhouette of a mountain, a treeline — and the sky does all the performing. Here the Earth fights back. The fishing boats, which use bright lights to attract squid and small pelagics, form their own constellations, dense and blue and scattered across the sea surface in patterns that look almost biological. The cities glow warm and linear, hugging coastlines. The sky's star trails are elegant but, honestly, they're the second most interesting light source in the frame. That inversion is what elevates this beyond a technically competent ISS photograph. There are thousands of star-trail images shot from orbit — it's a well-established genre among astronaut photographers, from Don Pettit's pioneering long exposures to more recent work by crew members on Expeditions 60 through 72. The genre's constraint is the same every time: the station moves, the stars move, the Earth glows. What you choose to include in the frame determines whether the image says anything or just looks pretty. Menon chose well. The Banda Sea is one of the world's most intensely fished bodies of water, and the light pollution from fishing fleets there is visible from space on any given night. By framing the shot to include both the star trails above and the fishing lights below, the image becomes a quiet document of human presence at planetary scale — not as a statement, just as a fact rendered in photons. The technical execution is clean. Long-duration exposures from the ISS require managing the station's own vibrations, thermal shifts in the camera body, and the challenge of getting the exposure time right when you're orbiting at 17,500 mph. The star trails here are smooth and unbroken, suggesting either a well-stabilized mount or careful post-processing (likely both). The color separation between the blue fishing lights and the yellow-orange city lights is preserved without blowing out either channel. As a photograph it sits comfortably in the upper tier of ISS imagery — technically accomplished, compositionally deliberate, and carrying just enough implicit meaning to hold attention past the initial wow. It's not the most striking orbital photograph ever taken, but it's one of the better ones at making you think about what the light means rather than just admiring that it's there.
