Stunning Photos of Earth from the International Space Station
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New Zealand looking stunning in the sunshine! South Island, looking down on Lake Wanaka with Lake Hawea below. North is to the right... Credit: European Space Agency
A little motivation for a Monday morning... This breathtaking sunrise was taken using a Nikon D4 camera with a 400mm lens. Sometimes the sun rises so rapidly that it’s hard to keep up adjusting the camera settings. European Space Agency
We have phases of "short nights" on the Internatonal Space Station ─ sunlight is nearly always visible right now. Taken looking northeast from over Tunisia, this pic shows Corsica and Sardinia left, the Tyrrhenian Sea, Italy and Sicily at right. .. European Space Agency
I was looking for Antarctica ─ hard to spot from our orbit. Settled for a moonset instead... European Space Agency
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Lovely pass over South Africa today. Still in awe of Eddie Izzard running 27 marathons across that stretch of land! European Space Agency
Andes looking north. The light brown area in the foreground is the Paracas National Reserve in Peru’s southern costal desert area. The Pacific is on the left and the vast Amazon rain forest is under cloud on the right... European Space Agency
Spotted a volcano smoking away on Russia's far east coast this morning ─ heat has melted snow around the top. These particular volcanoes are on the Kamchatka peninsula. The smoking one is Klyuchevskaya Sopka, the highest mountain on Kamchatka and the highest active volcano of Eurasia... European Space Agency
The Upsala Glacier on the right, in Argentina's Los Glaciares National Park, flowing from the Southern Patagonian Ice Field into Lake Argentino in the foreground. European Space Agency
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These little town blues.... Manhattan Island in the middle, north is left. The rectangular Central Park is very visible. Jersey City and Newark Bay to the bottom. European Space Agency
One of the world's oldest cities ─ Athens. The city of Athens is the center of this image, marked by the roads and the densely populated cluster of buildings. Ancient buildings such as the Parthenon cannot be seen with the naked eye from space, but the arid landscape was still evocative to me of the ancients... European Space Agency
Thick green fog of aurora. The top of the visible aurora can reach up to 400 km ─ the same altitude as the ISS. It was like flying through a beautiful mist. European Space Agency
British astronaut Tim Peake spent 186 days on the International Space Station, from December 15, 2015 to June 16, 2016. A novice photographer at the start, Peake experimented with different techniques and lenses, eventually becoming a pro at capturing earth images from space. The space station orbits the earth 16 times in 24 hours, affording a view of more than 1,000 kilometers on earth in every direction at any given time. Below are a selection of some of the best photos he captured, part of his book Hello, Is This Planet Earth?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)
Andrea Gawrylewski is the collections editor at Scientific American.
