One of the fun parts of being a biomedical flight controller (BME) is that BMEs get to work with the rest of the medical community at Johnson Space Center (JSC). On days like this when optical health testing takes place the BME MPSR or Multi-Purpose Support Room is full of Flight Surgeons, remote guiders, and hardware specialists. This makes the BME MPSR a pretty happening place to be at 2:00 AM.
The station runs on GMT or Greenwich Mean Time which is about 5 hours ahead of Houston time, so the first shift of the day called Orbit 1 (11 PM- 8 AM Houston Time) covers the station's morning, the second shift Orbit 2 ( 7 AM - 4 PM Houston Time) covers the afternoon into the evening, and the third shift Orbit 3 (3 PM - 12 AM Houston Time) covers the nighttime on the station. This means when the optical health testing that takes place in the crew's morning is in the middle of the night in Houston.
The optical testing is pretty cool, it is similar to seeing an eye doctor expect for the crew on the station, expect the eye doc is 250 some miles away and drinking coffee to wake up. There are a lot of great medical gains to these tests but I am going to let someone much more famous then me, and who has had first hand experience tell you all about the optical health testing that is performed on the International Space Station explain it to you: Astronaut Chris Hadfield on how eyesight is affected in space
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