Before bed it’s pleasant to read a newspaper, even one you’ve already read ten times. But I’ve started sleeping badly. I lie there like a young lady, daydreaming about all sorts of things. Remembering home, sleep gets broken, and I fall asleep somewhere around 2 AM. Will I really someday be on Earth among my loved ones and everything will be fine?

Yesterday we received our thousandth radiogram on Form 23, with ballistic information about the light-shadow conditions, orbit start times, and comm sessions. The whole day was visual observations. We’re silent today for some reason; I have to entertain myself — humming songs and flying around the station, keeping busy. I’ve finished plotting the fault line from the Caspian to Balkhash. Now, entering shadow, I watched the atmosphere stratify and change color, caused by the scattering of sunset rays in different air layers by altitude and composition.

When you look at the horizon 90 degrees to the Sun, right or left, as it descends you can see a diverging ray of a blue searchlight piercing the blackness of space, with its dark blue reflection on the orange clouds.

Our predecessors called them “whiskers.” Meanwhile, the horizon beneath the setting Sun itself changes its structure and coloring very dynamically, and when the Sun disappears, the atmospheric halo becomes a set of grayish-bluish-white steps.

I judge people not by how many things they’ve started but by how many they’ve finished and how. The era of space flights when science could be served by our curiosity is over; now is the time to be accountable for the results of work.