I slept through the first one. That is the thing nobody tells you: the first night without weight is not restful, and by the time the cabin had settled I had been awake for twenty hours. The commander left the shutters closed and let the four of us float.
The second day I set an alarm for every sunrise. There were sixteen, ninety-two minutes apart, and each one lasted about ten seconds — a line of orange, then blue, then a flash of white as the sun cleared the air. After the fourth I stopped photographing them.
What changes
You stop thinking of day and night as times and start thinking of them as places. The day side is below you for fifty-seven minutes; the night side for thirty-six. You can see where one ends.
On the last night we crossed the Atlantic in the dark with the aurora on the left and the lights of Lisbon coming up on the right, and I thought: I will never be able to explain this. I am trying anyway.