Don Pettit
@astro_Pettit
NASA Astronaut. Photographer. Scientist. Inventor.
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One of my favorite Milky Way photos from ISS, with the multicolored lights of Southeast Asia streaking across the exposure from orbital velocity, while distant stars remain fixed by my star tracker. The long exposure intensifies the atmospheric airglow into a thick red band!
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Timelapse of the rising Moon over the limb of Earth during the March 2025 lunar eclipse. Crew in orbit is lucky to see this a few times per year!
Nadir views of earthly auroras through a fisheye lens, distorting the planet into a green sphere. The Soyuz that brought my MS-26 crew and I is in the foreground. Fisheyes are less popular camera lenses to use in orbit but can make some way cool photos!
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Nighttime lights of Toronto, Canada are a patchwork of white and warm LEDs in a classic North American grid design. To the southwest, the airport blacks out a large area and an approaching cloud blurs the edge. The Great Lakes coastline is ocean-like in appearance!
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Dragon D1, the first SpaceX cargo vehicle, photographed on approach to the ISS as we orbited great thunderstorms. This spacecraft required manual berthing with the robotic arm as it could not autonomously dock! The design has come a long way in 14 years!
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Milky Way over Madagascar, a National Geographic collaboration with @BabakTafreshi to photograph the same subjects from Earth and space. Madagascar was a prime setting for its remoteness and natural beauty.
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Moonlight reflected off the Amazon river. At the proper angles in our orbit, we aboard @Space_Station can see brief silvery flashes atop water surfaces, illuminating even the darkest places on Earth.
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Orbital sunset through the window of SpaceX Dragon. With the oval frame in view it almost looks like a dragon's eye!
Orbiting the multicolored lights of Southeast Asia. Here green lights used on fishing boats are in greater quantities than anywhere else on the planet, dense enough to appear as bright green streaks in long exposure photography.
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Riverside lights of the Nile beneath a starry sky. I took this photo in 2012 when the majority of the lights were still sodium vapor, creating a thin golden glow that stretched from Alexandria to Aswan. One of the most striking nighttime views from orbit!
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Consecutive flashes of Starlink satellites on Earth's horizon, preluding a grand entrance of comet C/2023 A3 at orbital dawn.
Milky Way galaxy with a bright planet Venus rising through the hazy red airglow of Earth's atmosphere, above scattered purple lightning flashes. Two stormy worlds shining among endless stars!
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Lights of Italy, photographed from Earth and space in collaboration with National Geographic's @BabakTafreshi.
Oolitic sands of the Bahamas are one of the most photographed regions of Earth from space. These undersea sands shift over time and when formed in warm shallow waters produce vivid turquoise patterns.
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Bangladesh's Ganges river delta photographed in near-infrared from orbit. The lush plant life appears in bright magenta, starkly contrasting the water and revealing complex branch structures.
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I have spent 23 years documenting the global LED transition of city lighting from space.
Across my 4 missions to the ISS, I have photographed every major city on Earth, building a data set of the gradual replacement of sodium vapor lighting with LEDs.
The warmer, yellow-orange of gas discharge lamps has been phased out worldwide to multi-colored LEDs, citing energy savings and environmental reasons.
Widespread adoption has markedly changed the way our cities look from orbit, and as many have pointed out, how they feel to those on the ground!
Here is a collection of the most striking before-and-after photos I have observed:
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Star trails from the ISS! Lots of cool physics to see in these. Stars moving as thin lines in the direction of our orbital path but forming arcs to the left of our velocity vector. Lightning flashes making purple spots into the time history. City lights streak by. A faint red glow is seen as part of our upper atmosphere. Surreal!
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Orbiting over wavy green auroras! Moments like these are some of the most surreal in spaceflight. What a view!
Timelapse of the ISS Optimal Propellent Maneuver (OPM)! We use this to reorient station's attitude in preparation for docking events. This one occurred over some magnificent Mediterranean city lights!
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Star trails above and below Madagascar, photographed together from the ISS and Earth in collaboration with National Geographic's @BabakTafreshi.
