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Soaring over the Indian Ocean, Glenn experienced his first nightfall in space. It was spectacular. "As the sun goes down, it's very white, brilliant light, and as it goes below the horizon you get a very bright orange color. Down close to the surface it pales out into sort of a blue, a darker blue, and then off into black." The stars were bright diamonds on black velvet. "If you've been out in the desert on a very clear, brilliant night when there's no moon and the stars just seem to jump out at you, that's just about the way they look."
As he approached Australia. Glenn radioed Astronaut Gordon Cooper in the tracking station at Muchea: "That was about the shortest day I've ever run into. Just to my right, I can see a big pattern of light, apparently right on the coast." The glow was the city of Perth, which had prepared— a welcome for Glenn that was also a test of his night vision. Street lights were ablaze. Families turned on their porch lights, spread sheets out in the yard as reflectors. Taxi drivers flicked their lights on and off. When the lights were explained to him, Glenn radioed Cooper a grateful message: "Thank everybody for turning them on, will you?"
Then, in the first moments of dawn, Glenn saw a fantastic sight. At first he thought "that the capsule had gone up while I wasn't looking and that I was looking into nothing but a new star field. But this wasn't the case. There were thousands of little particles outside the cabin. They were a bright yellowish-green, about the size and intensity of a firefly on a real dark night. As far as I could look off to each side, I could see them."
Glenn speculated that the particles might be the cloud of needles the Air Force had tried to orbit last October* or that they might be snowflakes formed by the cooling of water vapor from his jet nozzles. But Glenn quickly rejected both theories. Best explanation of the phenomenon: the capsule was giving off electrically charged particles of water or gas vapor that were attracted to each other, built up the specks that Glenn saw. When Glenn later described the particles to George Rapp, a Project Mercury psychiatrist, he got the deadpan response: "What did they say. John?"
More Than a Sightseer. Throughout his thrilling day, John Glenn recorded the emotions and impressions of being the U.S.'s first tourist in orbital space. He had little sensation of speed. It was, he said, "about the same as flying in an airliner at, say, 30,000 feet, and looking down at clouds at 10,000 feet." During the daylight hours, he peered out his cabin window at the earth far below. Over California, he spotted part of the Imperial Valley to his left, and the Salton Sea; he could even pick out the irrigated acres around El Centro, where he once lived. Looking down on the Atlantic, he saw the Gulf Stream as a river of blue. Cabin temperature at one point went up to 108°, but Glenn was comfortable inside his separately cooled space suit.