New Year’s Eve Where In The Universe Challenge

We’ll squeeze in one more WITU Challenge for 2008! The goal of this challenge is to test your skills and knowledge of the cosmos. Guess where in the Universe this image is from, and give yourself extra points if you can guess which spacecraft is responsible for the image. Post your guess in the comment section (no links to hints please!) and check back tomorrow for the answer. Good luck, and Happy New Year!

UPDATE (1/1/09): The answer has now been posted below. If you haven’t made your guess yet, no peeking before you do!!

This beautiful image shows the setting sun glinting off the Amazon River and numerous lakes in its floodplain, taken by an astronaut on board the ISS in August 19, 2008. About 150 kilometers of the sinuous Amazon is shown here; the area is about 1,000 kilometers inland from the Atlantic Ocean. A member of Expedtion 17 took the image with a Nikon D2Xs digital camera fitted with a 400 mm lens. This image is part of the ISS Crew Earth Observations experiment. The original image can be seen at NASA’s Earth Observatory website.

I really will provide the answer and a link to the original picture when it is time. There’s really no need to provide links to the answer in the comments.

Happy New Year, and check back again next week for another Where In The Universe Challenge.