The International Space Station is a marvel of engineering, and has also provided an amazing vantage point for photographing our blue marble below. Russian Cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin has some of the most time spent aboard the space station, with over 672 days spent in space.
Over that time he has captured some incredible photos of Earth. Below are some of his collection, showing tropical islands, volcanoes, the winding Amazon, and so many more unique and beautiful perspectives.
We always find that looking at the Earth from above shows us the small fragility of our only home, and how we need to protect it.
Yurchikhin flew five times between 2002 and 2017, first on the Space Shuttle and then on Soyuz, and commanded the station twice. Photography became a serious pursuit somewhere along the way. From 250 miles up, orbiting the planet every 90 minutes, the station passes over every landscape on Earth between the polar circles, and the images below show the range. There are coral atolls in the Pacific, the perfect cone of a snow-capped volcano, a plume of ash from an eruption, the curling meanders of a jungle river, center-pivot farm fields drawn as green circles on the desert, and the Richat Structure in Mauritania, the eroded dome that astronauts call the Eye of the Sahara. A few frames turn the camera the other way, catching a spacewalk, a docked Soyuz and the thin orange line of a sunrise on the edge of the atmosphere.
Via Design You Trust:
We return to this view often. See Landsat’s snapshots of Earth from space, Don Pettit’s images from the station, and more gorgeous images of Earth from orbit. Our science section collects the rest.
