Day off. I’ve noticed — these are some of the hardest days. We each do our own thing. I filmed the horizon’s structure through the “Puma” optical telescope at 15x magnification.

I also want to film a polar aurora on 400 ASA color film and a sunrise — what a colorful spectacle. The Sun, as it passes behind the atmosphere, isn’t round as we’re used to seeing it on Earth; it’s flattened and as it rises above the horizon it straightens out like a ball being inflated. Fascinating to watch: on the horizon a living rainbow, one colored band replacing another, widths and brightness changing — the atmosphere, like a prism, plays with the colors of sunlight. All this happens between the fiery-colored Earth at the sunrise point and the gray cosmos washed out by the bright light of the starting day. Shooting the Sun at 15x magnification is tricky — the field of view is tiny, and you must use a 1000x filter, so it’s hard to predict where the Sun will rise. To protect my face and eyes, I pulled a shirt over my head and cut eye slits, like a mask. Before this I’d once burned my eyes — the whites turned yellow — and had to treat them with burn ointment from the first aid kit.

We turn on music rarely now. We talk to ourselves. Lyusya and Vitalik came on comm. They look well. Vitalka says: “Papa, I brought you three fives.” I ask: “In what subjects?” He answers: geography, literature, and one more. I say: “In geography, God himself ordained you to get a five. Every week at Mission Control on the information map you see what continents, seas, oceans, and islands your father flies over. Better tell me, son, how’s your math?” I see him pretend not to hear and quickly pass the microphone to his mother, who diplomatically says: “In math, father, we’re not doing great yet.” He wasn’t especially embarrassed and acted as if nothing happened.

How we love our children, and how we want to ease their lives, protect them from bad people and hardships. And without realizing what we’re doing, through our tenderness we create a gap between us, taking their burdens onto our shoulders, sheltering them at every step, which often leads to their not understanding real life, our fate, our sacrifices. Everyone must build their own destiny and walk the hard path of understanding the meaning of people’s lives through failures, mistakes, and trials. Then we and our lives will be closer and dearer to our children.