Sleep is bad; I have trouble falling asleep, thoughts about the flight crowd into my head — about not forgetting to do all the necessary operations before bed. If you remember something, you climb out of the sleeping bag and fly to the instrument panel to turn something on or off. Got up around ten. Went on comm, listened to a radio concert whose program our families helped put together. The concert opened with my favorite song, performed by Boris Shtokolov. And out across the world rang the rollicking, mighty Russian song “From Beyond the Island to the Main Current.” Tolya and I joined in, the guys on comm backed us up, and together with Mission Control we sang. Wonderful. Then we sang “The Cranes.” I love that one too; it feels good when people sense and understand you.

I did a lot of Earth observation work today. My main task is to learn to calculate the observation point and compute its coordinates. Unfortunately, there isn’t even a compass or ruler on board — what’s needed is a navigation table, like what navigators have. You could eat lunch on it too, and have a set of maps on top with various devices — everything for navigation measurements, for plotting fault lines, marking plankton zones in the ocean, and so on. For now, my coordinate determination has an error of 20-30 km; I think it’s mostly instrumental error. As you get to know the Earth, an enormous thirst for activity appears.

At night, unfortunately, I don’t look at the Earth much. Cities are clearly visible, glowing in clusters of lights; there’s a lot of lightning. When the Earth is illuminated by the Moon, the cloud cover and horizon are clearly visible. Beautiful, and you want to share it with the whole world; you try to keep photographing. Right now we’re laying out the documentation for tomorrow’s experiments.

It’s already midnight; I’m loading the camera — and then to bed. And at night you can also see flashes in your eyes, but fewer compared to my first flight on Soyuz-13. The station itself provides better protection against the penetration of heavy atomic nuclei from cosmic rays. The flashes appear different — like lightning, exploding little balls, or sometimes like dashes. On the Soyuz-13 ship, the flashes sometimes even dazzled me, but they don’t interfere with sleep.

When you lie down, at first you don’t feel sleepy; thoughts come about everything, and it’s pleasant. You think calmly, rest, and then a heavy wave rolls in, and it seems like it’s about to carry you away, and you want it to. But suddenly the wave passes, you don’t feel sleepy again, and thoughts, thoughts… I didn’t used to hear the fans, but now they’re noisy. We sleep on the ceiling, in sleeping bags. When you toss and want to stretch your legs, they bump against the airlock chamber; and when you toss, the sleeping bag flaps open and you start getting cold, since at night we turn on the cooling loops to draw condensation from the station’s atmosphere. So I sleep in felt boots.