Start Date: End Date: Published Date Data Date
Nardo Ring, Italy
Published September 10, 2007
The Nardò Ring is a striking visual feature from space, and astronauts have photographed it several times. The Ring is a race car test track; it is 12.5 kilometers long and steeply banked to reduce the amount of active steering needed by drivers. Although it is a perfect circle, it appears oval in this photograph. This distortion is because the astronaut’s viewing angle was 35 degrees, looking back along the orbit track to the southwest from the International Space Station’s window.
Related images:
540 x 540 JPEG
1000 x 1000 433 KB - JPEG
Shiveluch Volcano, Russia’s Far East
Published September 3, 2007
Shiveluch is one of the biggest and most active of a line of volcanoes that follow the spine of the Kamchatka Peninsula in easternmost Russia. The volcanoes and peninsula are part of the tectonically active “Ring of Fire,” a zone of active volcanoes and frequent earthquakes that nearly surrounds the Pacific Ocean.
540 x 334 JPEG
1000 x 618 480 KB - JPEG
Ceuta, Northern Africa
Published August 27, 2007
he southern tip of Spain and the northern tip of Africa come close to touching at the Strait of Gibraltar. The small Spanish enclave Ceuta occupies a narrow isthmus of land on the African side of the Strait of Gibraltar; the rest of the surrounding territory is Morocco.
540 x 405 JPEG
1000 x 618 438 KB - JPEG
Hurricane Dean
Published August 20, 2007
While weather and Earth science satellites are known for getting a perspective on storms as they orbit the Earth, they were not the only sensors viewing Hurricane Dean from high above. Astronauts aboard the International Space Station and the crew of the Space Shuttle Endeavour passed over the storm on August 18.
540 x 672 JPEG
3032 x 2007 2 MB - JPEG
2008 x 3032 1 MB Bytes - JPEG
Smoke Plumes over Idaho and Montana
On August 13, 2007, while docked to the International Space Station (ISS), the crew members of Shuttle Mission STS-118 and ISS Expedition 15 reported seeing the smoke plumes from wide-spread fires across Idaho and Montana. The crew photographed and downlinked images of isolated plumes and regional views of the smoke from different perspectives.
1000 x 618 230 KB - JPEG
1000 x 618 203 KB - JPEG
Polar Mesospheric Clouds
Published August 13, 2007
In June 2007, the Space Shuttle crew visiting the International Space Station (ISS) observed spectacular polar mesospheric clouds over north-central Asia. TThe red-to-dark region at the bottom of the image is the dense part of the Earth’s atmosphere.
1000 x 618 292 KB - JPEG
Bechar Basin, Algeria
Published August 6, 2007
The Béchar Basin of northwest Algeria formed as layers of sedimentary rocks from the Paleozoic Era (250-540 million years ago) folded and cracked during collisions of Africa and Europe during the Tertiary Period (2-65 million years ago). In this photograph of part of the basin captured by astronauts, dark brown to tan folded ridges of these Paleozoic sedimentary layers extend across the image from top to bottom.
1000 x 750 375 KB - JPEG
Brooklyn, New York Waterfront
Published July 30, 2007
his astronaut photograph captures the dense urban fabric of Brooklyn, New York City’s largest borough (population of 2.6 million), characterized by the regular pattern of highly reflective building rooftops (white). Two main arteries from Manhattan into Brooklyn—the famous Brooklyn Bridge and neighboring Manhattan Bridge—cross the East River along the left (north) side of the image.
1000 x 750 571 KB - JPEG
Upheaval Dome, Utah
Published July 23, 2007
Upheaval Dome is a striking geologic structure in the Canyonlands National Park of southern Utah. The alternating rock layers make a nearly circular, 5.5-kilometer- (3.4-mile-) diameter “bull’s-eye.” This photograph of Upheaval Dome was taken by an astronaut onboard the International Space Station. The oblique viewing angle—in other words, not looking straight down—provides a sense of the topography within and around the structure. The dome appears more like an ellipse than a circle due to the oblique viewing perspective.
1000 x 611 217 KB - JPEG
Algae in Great Salt Lake
Published July 16, 2007
The Great Salt Lake of northern Utah is a remnant of glacial Lake Bonneville that extended over much of present-day western Utah and into the neighboring states of Nevada and Idaho approximately 32,000 to 14,000 years ago. The north arm of the lake, displayed in this astronaut photograph from April 30, 2007, typically has twice the salinity of the rest of the lake due to impoundment of water by a railroad causeway that crosses the lake from east to west. The causeway restricts water flow, and the separation has led to a striking division in the types of algae and bacteria found in the north and south arms of the lake.
540 x 720 JPEG
662 x 1000 117 KB - JPEG
Maracaibo City and Oil Slick, Venezuela
Published July 9, 2007
This astronaut photograph depicts the narrow strait between Lake Maracaibo and the Gulf of Venezuela. The brackish lake sits on top of a vast reservoir of buried oil deposits.
1000 x 547 184 KB - JPEG
Patuxent River Naval Air Station, Maryland
Published July 2, 2007
Maryland’s Patuxent River Naval Air Station is located on a small peninsula, bordered by the Patuxent River to the north-northeast and Chesapeake Bay to the east and southeast. International Space Station crews frequently use the Patuxent River Naval Air Station as a geographic reference point and photographic training target. This astronaut photograph illustrates why—the distinctive pattern of the airfield runways and the station’s location in Chesapeake Bay make it easy to spot from orbit.
1000 x 1000 555 KB - JPEG