photos of earth Archives

Spectacular View of the Alps From Space!
Expedition 42 Flight Engineer Samantha Cristoforetti of the European Space Agency (ESA) took this photograph of the Alps from the International Space Station. She wrote, “I’m biased, but aren’t the Alps from space spectacular? What a foggy day on the Po plane, though! #Italy” Credit: NASA/ESA/Samantha Cristoforetti
Updated with more images[/caption]

As we say goodbye to 2014 and ring in New Year 2015, the Expedition 42 crew living and working aboard the International Space Station enjoys the new gallery of images they’ve sent back of “Our Beautiful Earth.”

The current six person crew includes astronauts and cosmonauts from three nations – America, Russia, and Italy – and the four men and two women are celebrating New Year’s 2015 aboard the massive orbiting lab complex.

Happy New Year! Celebrating from space with @AstroTerry. Credit: NASA/Terry Virts

They comprise Expedition 42 Commander Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Terry Virts from NASA, Samantha Cristoforetti from the European Space Agency (ESA), and cosmonauts Aleksandr Samokutyayev, Yelena Serova, and Anton Shkaplerov from Russia.

Beauty everywhere! Flying from the Mediterranean to the Caspian Sea, this appeared through the clouds.#HelloEarth. Credit: NASA/ESA/Samantha Cristoforetti

The ISS has been continuously occupied by humans for 15 years. And they are joined by Robonaut 2 who recently got legs.

This area saw some serious action about 350 million years ago! Gweni-Fada meteorite crater in #Chad. Credit: NASA/ESA/Samantha Cristoforetti

Terry Virts and Samantha Cristoforetti have been especially prolific in picture taking and posting to social media for us all to enjoy the view while speeding merrily along at 17,500 mph from an altitude of about 250 miles (400 kilometers) above Earth.

Here’s a special New Year video greeting from Wilmore and Virts:

Video Caption: Happy New Year from the International Space Station from NASA astronauts Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Terry Virts. Credit: NASA

“Happy New Year from the International Space Station!” said Wilmore.

“We figure that we will be over midnight somewhere on the Earth on New Year’s for 16 times throughout this day. So we plan to celebrate New Year’s 16 times with our comrades and our people down on Earth.”

No sunsets until Jan 4th- we are in a "high beta" orbit now, so this is as dark as it gets. Credit: NASA/Terry Virts — No sunsets until Jan 4th- we are in a “high beta” orbit now, so this is as dark as it gets. Credit: NASA/Terry Virts

“We wish everybody a happy, healthy, and prosperous 2015 as we get the awesome privilege of celebrating New Year’s here on the space station with our six station crewmates,” added Virts!

“We’ll enjoy our 16 New Year’s celebrations here.”

Part of the #Aral sea peaking through the clouds as we flew into #Kazakhstan! #HelloEarth. Credit: NASA/ESA/Samantha Cristoforetti

They plan to celebrate the dawn of 2015 with fruit juice toasts, NASA reports.

The year 2015 starts officially for the station crew at midnight by the Universal Time Clock (UTC), also known as Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), in London, or at 7 p.m. EST Dec. 31.

If I couldn't be in space right now I'd want to be here- #Hawaii. Credit: NASA/Terry Virts — If I couldn’t be in space right now I’d want to be here- #Hawaii. Credit: NASA/Terry Virts

New Year’s Day 2015 is a day off for the crew.

And I’m certain they’ll be gazing out the windows capturing more views of “Our Beautiful Earth!”

42 è la risposta! // 42 is the answer! #Expedition42 Guide to the galaxy. Credit: @NASA_Astronauts #AstroButch

And don’t forget to catch up on the Christmas holiday imagery and festivities from the station crews in my recent stories – here and here.

#NewYork NewYork! Can almost see the Statue of Liberty. Which is, by the way, #UNESCO#WorldHeritage! Credit: NASA/ESA/Samantha Cristoforetti

Be sure to remember that you can always try and catch of glimpse of the ISS flying overhead by checking NASA’s Spot the Station website with a complete list of locations.

It’s easy to plug in and determine visibilities in your area worldwide. And try to shoot a time-lapse view like mine below.

ISS streaks over Princeton, NJ - time lapse image. Credit: Ken Kremer — ISS streaks over Princeton, NJ – time lapse image. Credit: Ken Kremer

Meanwhile the crew continues science operations and preparations for next week’s arrival of the next unmanned space station resupply ship on the SpaceX CRS-5 mission.

CRS-5 is slated to blast off atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on Jan. 6 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.

SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is set to soar to ISS after completing successful static fire test on Dec. 19 ahead of planned CRS-5 mission for NASA in early January 2015. Credit: Ken Kremer – kenkremer.com — SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is set to soar to the ISS after completing a successful static fire test on Dec. 19 ahead of the planned CRS-5 mission for NASA in early January 2015. Credit: Ken Kremer – kenkremer.com

Stay tuned here for Ken’s continuing Earth and planetary science and human spaceflight news.

Ken Kremer

ISS astronauts Barry “Butch” Wilmore, NASA, Samantha Cristoforetti, ESA and Terry Virts, NASA send Christmas 2014 greetings from the space station to the people of Earth. Credit: NASA/ESA — ISS astronauts Barry “Butch” Wilmore, NASA, Samantha Cristoforetti, ESA, and Terry Virts, NASA, send Christmas 2014 greetings from the space station to the people of Earth. Credit: NASA/ESA

ISS Expedition 42. Credit: NASA/ESA/Roscosmos

NASA’s Voyager spacecraft pushed further out into space than any other mission before them. Voyager 1 and 2 visited Jupiter and Saturn, and Voyager 2 went on to travel to Uranus and Neptune. In 1990, after Voyager 2 completed its mission of visiting the outer planets, Carl Sagan encouraged NASA to have the Voyager 1 spacecraft to take a final picture of Earth, from a distance of more than 6 billion kilometers from Earth. The resulting image showed Earth as nothing more than a tiny spec, a “pale blue dot“. That was the name given to it by Carl Sagan, and it stuck.

Voyager 1 took this photograph in 1990, when it was approximately 40.5 astronomical units from Earth (6 billion km, or 3.8 billion miles). It was taken at a height of 32° above the plane of the ecliptic, using red, green and blue filters. Earth is the little dot circled in the image. The beams you see in the image are a glare from the Sun seen by Voyager 1’s camera.

Sagan wrote a book with the title “Pale Blue Dot”, and he gave a commencement address in 1996 reflecting on the image:

“Look again at that dot. That’s here, that’s home, that’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”

We’ve written many articles about Carl Sagan for Universe Today. Here’s an article remembering Carl Sagan, and here’s Sagan’s personal influence on my own life. We also used the Pale Blue Dot image as one of our famous Where in the Universe contests.

If you’d like more info on Earth, check out NASA’s Solar System Exploration Guide on Earth. And here’s a link to NASA’s Earth Observatory.

We’ve also recorded an episode of Astronomy Cast all about planet Earth. Listen here, Episode 51: Earth.

Tag: photos of earth

Our Beautiful Earth – Happy New Year Photos and Greetings from the ISS Crew

Pale Blue Dot