IT'S hardly unusual to find things flashing into your head as you fall asleep, but as Christer Fuglesang was settling down on his first night aboard the International Space Station it happened quite literally. It was December 2006, and as the European Space Agency astronaut floated, eyes closed, in his sleeping bag he suddenly saw a spot of white light surrounded by a faint halo. It vanished in an instant but Fuglesang realised immediately what it was. "I had heard about these things and so was very happy to have finally experienced one," he says.
Since Buzz Aldrin and Neil Amstrong first reported these flashes during the Apollo 11 mission to the moon in 1969, dozens of astronauts have seen them. An investigation by NASA after Apollo 11 returned concluded that the flashes, sometimes called "phosphenes", were a consequence of fast-moving particles, most probably cosmic rays, ...
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