note: not an answer and too long for a comment...
Did the ISS just turn upside-down? Nauka docking attitude maneuvers; did the cupola near pointing zenith and therefore show only black sky w/ stars?
As @OrganicMarble points out:
No. The ISS yawed 180 degrees, stayed like that for ~ a week, then yawed back around.
But frighteningly, just a short time later it DID
...though this was not a maneuver related to docking, nor was it even planned.
From Gizmodo's The ISS Backflipped Out of Control After Russian Module Misfired, New Details Reveal:
At a press conference held later that day, NASA said the space station shifted by around 45 degrees. “That’s been a little incorrectly reported,” Zebulon Scoville, the NASA flight director in charge at the time, told the New York Times. The actual figure, he said, is closer to 540 degrees, which means the ISS performed 1.5 backflips, in an impromptu performance that would make an Olympic athlete jealous. When the ISS stopped spinning, it was fully upside down, requiring a 180-degree forward flip to regain the outpost’s original position, as the New York Times reports.
The article links to this tweet by Scoville:
Lead MLM Flight Director Greg Whitney and I split the shift today. Never have I ever: 1)been prouder of the team that sits in MCC and lives on
@Space_Station, 2)had to declare a spacecraft emergency until now, 3)been so happy to see all solar arrays + radiators still attached.
The Gizmodo article says later:
In an email, a NASA spokesperson said the “initial value reported by flight controllers, which was called up to the station astronauts in real time and shared via NASA tweets/live coverage, was 45 degrees.” This value, according to the spokesperson, was being reported as the event was still unfolding, that is, as Nauka, also known as the Russian Multipurpose Laboratory Module (MLM), was still firing its thrusters and as flight controllers were continuing to change the station’s orientation. The value offered by Scoville—540 degrees—was “confirmed only after the post-event analysis was complete,” the spokesperson explained.
and
“And so at first I was like, ‘Oh, is this a false indication?’” Mr. Scoville said. “And then I looked up at the video monitors and saw all the ice and thruster firings. This is no kidding. A real event. So let’s get to it. You get about half a breath of ‘Oh, geez, what now?’ and then you kind of push that down and just work the problem.”
Nauka’s thrusters had started firing, trying to pull away from a space station it was securely docked to.
Worse, there was no way to turn them off.
His counterparts at the mission control in Russia told him that Nauka was configured so that it could receive commands directly only from a ground station in Russia. The next pass over Russia was 70 minutes away.
It also includes the following graphic. If it was thrusting to "pull away from a space station it was securely docked to" that means thrust would have been directed downwards (exhaust: upwards) which is exactly what would cause a "backflip".
Cupola would have pointed roughly upwards for about a few minutes
below that tweet Scoville confirmed the rate was roughly 0.5 degrees per second, so the cupola might have pointed within roughly 30 degrees of the zenith for perhaps two minutes assuming the backflip was executed symmetrically.
Graphic showing the ISS configuration as of July 29, 2021. Image: NASA
