English: JOHN E. NAUGLE, Associate Administrator for Space Science and Applications, NASA, recalls: "This is the first photograph of the night airglow taken from above. It was taken by Gordon Cooper during his orbital flight of May 15, 1963, aboard Friendship 7, for an experiment conducted by Edward P. Ney, W. F. Hutch, and F. C. Gillett of the University of Minnesota. The photograph is a 2-minute exposure taken early in the satellite night as the spacecraft faced backward over the eastern coast of Australia. The flashes in the foreground are individual lightning discharges from four active regions in a storm. The successive flashes recede into the distance as the spacecraft moves away from the storm. The airglow layer, very much smeared by spacecraft motion, is the greenish band which begins about an inch in the photo above the horizon as delineated by the lightning flashes in the distance. This and other photographs show an airglow layer 24 kilometers thick and 77 to 110 kilometers above the horizon."