Geophysics experiment day (GF). I don’t like them. In these, the human’s role comes down to mechanically entering commands on the MKF-6 (multispectral camera), MSS (mass spectrometer), FM-107 (Fourier mass spectrometer), and KATE-140 (wide-format camera). It’s long past time to put these under control of the onboard computer, so you enter a program of the necessary exposures, apertures, filters, and compensations, load film, and let it click away on its own, while the person does more productive work: searching for objects of study in the atmosphere, on Earth, and inside the station itself, cross-referencing information, analyzing it, and selecting recording instruments. This is also needed because GF experiments are conducted in orbital orientation, which is convenient for visual observations and mapping of objects on Earth.

Today I made a mistake — shot 50 frames on the MKF-6 with the porthole cover closed. That’s lack of focus, because we went to bed late last night. But really, they should have built in an interlock preventing the shutter from opening when the porthole cover is closed. Unpleasant to have made an error. Reported it to the ground.

“Oasis” is working like clockwork. The oats have risen to 10-12 cm, and other plants are sprouting too. In “Fiton,” delicate stems thin as a hair have appeared, with three leaves. I’m amazed they’re still alive. The biologists say they should bloom. We’ll see. In the evening, in gravitational orientation, we worked with the EFO.

We set the instrument in the transfer compartment at porthole No. 17 and, upon entering shadow, picked a couple of stars setting below the horizon. However, through its viewfinder I couldn’t identify the chosen star because of the small field of view and the distortion of the star pattern from magnification, and there was no way to peek through the porthole to verify the EFO’s aim, since the instrument completely blocks it. I tried moving it to another porthole in the dark. In short, nothing worked on the first attempt. Next time we’ll use porthole No. 19 or No. 20, since they’re side by side, so one can be used to verify the instrument’s aim on the chosen star. If the experiment works out, the results should be interesting. The Atlantic. I’m looking at the Bermuda Islands. They’re oddly shaped, mountainous, like light-brown arcs, and all around is an ocean mosaic of complex and localized color patches, resembling an artist’s palette in its variety of hues, power, and delicacy of tone.

Passing over South America, I saw the Amazon. It looks like an enormous python stretched toward the ocean, in patches of light yellow. I was curious about the patches; I looked through the magnifying sight — they turned out to be sandy shoals. In the evening, Zhenya Kobzev, our crew physician, came on the line. He communicated through our code table that during conversations with the ground, irritation sometimes slips through in our voices. He asked us to be more careful. It’s midnight now; I just finished the biology work. I extracted the seed assemblies from the magnetogravistat and the small Biogravistat centrifuge. I performed chemical fixation of the seeds to preserve them until return to Earth. At first glance there’s no visible difference in germination between seeds grown outside these units and those exposed to the magnetic field and acceleration. Probably only laboratory analysis will reveal it.

Every night, when we lie down to sleep, there are flashes in our eyes — their character is entirely varied: spheres, dashes, crosses, bands, dots, and so on. But I noticed one peculiarity. After a flash, if you recall someone’s image in your mind, it appears lifelike; you perceive it vividly. There’s depth and volume to the perception. I ran an experiment: as soon as a flash appeared, I’d begin remembering familiar places and loved ones, and I’d see it all as in a color film or a dream. But this state lasts only 5-10 minutes and quickly fades.

Now I understand what puzzled me during my first flight on “Soyuz-13,” when I first encountered this phenomenon. Back then it was unexpected; I was struck that, as I fell asleep and a flash came, I could see with closed eyes the volume of the compartment I was in, with all its interior, in bright white light. At that moment I wondered if I was sleeping with my eyes open and the flash, like lightning, was illuminating the capsule. It was amazing, incomprehensible, and even frightening. Now, after many observations of this effect on the station, I believe what gets illuminated is the last frame of my surroundings seen before sleep. Possibly this frame is read by consciousness from the retina’s screen, excited by the flash, and reproduced by memory as a vivid image. This creates the ability to see, as in waking life, various pictures summoned by consciousness from the depths of memory, but only for a short time. With eyes closed, the reproduced picture looks flatter, more silhouetted, as if on a dark screen, but after a flash it becomes brighter and more three-dimensional. In daylight with open eyes I haven’t noticed the flashes. I can say that their intensity varies, but I haven’t been able to detect any patterns in their occurrence. Tomorrow we begin training for the spacewalk.