The International Space Station’s Instagram feed is a great place to see what astronauts and cosmonauts are up to while working on missions miles above Earth. Social media savvy space workers use a variety of platforms, like Twitter, to share their outer space experiences with Earth. Today astronauts celebrated St. Patrick’s day. While it’s not clear if they were allowed to have a beer in space (actually, it’s very certain they were not allowed to), they got much closer to the home of the Irish holiday than many on Earth.
NASA Astronaut Terry W. Virts tweeted out this image as the space station passed over Irish territory.
#HappyStPatrickDay with best wishes from the #E43 crew! From space you can see the “Emerald Isle” is very green! pic.twitter.com/cMdhCd0zCb
— Terry W. Virts (@AstroTerry) March 17, 2015
On Instagram, the ISS feed shared a spectacular photo of the green aurora borealis, or Northern lights, along with Ireland at night. A spectacularly different way to view St. Patrick’s day.
A photo posted by International Space Station (@iss) on
The International Space Station orbits Earth every 90 minutes, which means every 24 hours the space station orbits Earth about 16 times.