Day off. Slept until noon. That’s what happens when the body is worn out from sleepless nights — as soon as the pressure lets up, it immediately takes what it needs. The main thing is to calmly understand that bad moods, setbacks, and insomnia are all passing, and under no circumstances should you seek salvation in medicine at such times, give in to weakness, but endure and endure again. And as soon as things normalize, the body will take what’s due and quickly restore its strength.

During the day we prepared the bath and washed. Had a good wash. After that I put on clean underclothes, grabbed my favorite foods, heated water, and had such a delicious lunch! My soul felt light, as if an abscess had burst. I thought Tolya would wash up and we’d have tea and lunch together, but Tolya for some reason declined. By 6 in the evening, Lyusya came on comm and started the conversation so well: first with Tolya, she read him a postcard from Lida and told him everything about her and the kids, and then she started talking with me. Good for her! This may seem like a small thing, but up here it’s noticeable and really helps with the communication. In the next session my sister came on, and we had a cheerful conversation, though she nearly drove me crazy talking about my weight loss, as if everyone has conspired to talk about the same thing. Then she told me about Tarasov’s article in “Komsomolka,” where he writes about how Tolya saves me after I lose consciousness during the spacewalk, without saying at the very beginning that this is a standard training scenario in the hydro tank. I think such a device is unacceptable in a documentary essay about a real flight. Today I saw Hawaii. Outwardly they don’t look as cheerful and exotic as in songs. One large island looks like a mountain plateau above water, more precisely, like a hill with a leveled-off upper part of brown color and two volcanoes on its surface. Nothing especially vivid — no beautiful water patterns like in the Bahamas or plankton, no patches of greenery, etc.

We’re approaching our milestone. Three months of flight, and that’s already a term. Today I worked with the “Niva” video recorder. Cloud patterns come out well, their structure is well rendered, but the Earth itself is still poorly visible. I consulted with the specialists. From their experience working with aerial photography equipment and the “Niva” video system on a laboratory aircraft, they recommended using filters that block the ultraviolet part of the spectrum and the blue component of the optical range. The thing is, when observing the Earth from space, we see it as if through a “blue sky,” which we’re accustomed to seeing as such from Earth, and now it, as fantastic as it sounds, has ended up below us, distorting the true colors of our planet’s face for the instruments.

True, why is the sky blue? Probably few people would answer correctly, even though Lord Rayleigh answered this question back in 1871 in an article “On the light from the sky, its polarization and colour.” From school years, many probably remember the mnemonic formula for the solar light spectrum: “Roy G. Biv” — which determines the sequence of rainbow colors from long red waves to short violet ones. So, according to Rayleigh’s theory, the coloring of the sky arises from the scattering of sunlight by air molecules and suspended particles, and the scattering intensity of waves close to violet — that is, blue and azure — is 16 times greater than that of waves in the red part of the spectrum. That’s why we see the sky as blue or light blue. We did a careful adjustment of the TV camera, filtering out the blue veil of the atmosphere, with color balance adjustment and contrast and brightness regulation. After this, the quality of the Earth’s image improved dramatically. I loaded the “instant photography” camera and shot a roll of Earth images. Two photos of Australia came out well.

In life, unfortunately, it happens that a person who shares everything and is kind to people isn’t valued, and this is often taken for granted by those who themselves give nothing.