Home, Seen From Above: Earth's Most Breathtaking Views From Space

From the flight deck of Space Shuttle Discovery during the STS-39 mission in April-May 1991, a crew member captured this 35mm photograph of the Aurora Australis — the Southern Lights — arcing in a crimson crown above the limb of the Earth. Auroras are produced when charged particles from the Sun interact with Earth's magnetic field lines and collide with atmospheric gases, causing them to emit light. The red colour indicates oxygen atoms at high altitudes (above 200 km) being excited by this particle bombardment. From orbit, the aurora appears as a continuous luminous band encircling the polar regions.

Another frame from the STS-39 aurora sequence shows a different character entirely — thin vertical spikes of green aurora rising above a sinuous green airglow band near the horizon. The green airglow is produced by oxygen atoms at around 90 kilometres altitude, excited by ultraviolet solar radiation during the day and slowly releasing that energy as visible light throughout the night. Space Shuttle crews found the aurora one of the most reliably stunning phenomena of low-Earth orbit — constantly changing in shape and colour as the solar wind conditions shifted.

The STS-39 mission was specifically designed, in part, to study auroral phenomena — its primary payload was the Air Force Program 675 shuttle pallet satellite, which deployed instruments to measure aurora spectral and spatial characteristics. This third aurora image from the mission shows a sinuous loop of emission curving over the southern pole, a structure created by the shape of Earth's magnetic field lines channelling charged particles down toward the atmosphere. The combination of mission purpose and extraordinary photographic opportunity made STS-39's aurora archive among the most scientifically valuable in the Space Shuttle program.

On December 24, 1968, Apollo 8 astronaut William Anders took the first colour photograph of Earth rising above the lunar horizon — an image that became one of the most influential photographs ever taken and helped launch the modern environmental movement. This image from a 2013 NASA event commemorating the 45th anniversary uses a new digital visualisation to recreate the moment precisely, reconstructing the spacecraft's exact position and attitude to show what the crew saw as they emerged from behind the Moon. "We came all this way to explore the Moon," Anders later reflected, "and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth."

In February 1974, the crew of Skylab 4 photographed their departing space station from the Command and Service Module as they began their journey home — the last humans to visit Skylab before it was de-orbited in 1979. The image shows the station against a cloud-covered Earth, one solar panel missing after being torn away during launch, the replacement panel installed by the first crew during a daring EVA. Skylab was America's first space station and proved that humans could live and work productively in space for months at a time, paving the way for the International Space Station.

From the International Space Station in June 2014, an Expedition 40 crew member composed this extraordinary image of sunlight illuminating a thunderstorm from below, turning the cloud tops into a glowing orange and gold surface that looks almost geological. The tweet accompanying the image read: "Sun highlights a storm from underneath." At ISS altitude, weather systems become visible as three-dimensional objects, their vertical extent obvious in a way that ground-based radar can only approximate. Hurricane spiral arms, towering cumulonimbus cells, the flat anvils of mature thunderstorms — all become objects of sculptural beauty when seen from above.

On St Patrick's Day 2015, the Expedition 43 crew aboard the ISS photographed Ireland from orbit and posted it to social media with the message: "From space you can see the Emerald Isle is very green!" The photograph shows the island living up to its name in spectacular fashion — almost unnaturally vivid in the low-angled sunlight, surrounded by dark Atlantic water. Images like this one have made the ISS crew's social media accounts among the most followed in science communication, bringing the perspective of orbit to millions of people who will never leave the atmosphere.

During the STS-75 mission in February 1996, the crew of Space Shuttle Columbia took this geographic portrait of Earth, one of thousands of Earth observation images systematically captured during Shuttle missions. STS-75 deployed the Tethered Satellite System — a satellite on a 20-kilometre cable designed to generate electricity from its passage through Earth's magnetic field. The cable broke spectacularly, releasing the satellite into a separate orbit, but the Earth photography program continued uninterrupted, building an archive that atmospheric scientists still use to study long-term climate change.

This daytime Earth observation from Expedition 40 in mid-2014 shows the planet as it appears during most of an orbital pass: blue ocean, white cloud systems, the familiar outlines of coastlines. The ordinariness of the scene is deceptive — every detail visible here represents atmospheric and oceanic processes of staggering complexity. ISS crew members photograph Earth thousands of times during each six-month tour, contributing to databases used by climate scientists, disaster response teams, agricultural researchers, and oceanographers around the world.

From the flight deck of Space Shuttle Discovery during the STS-39 mission in April-May 1991, a crew member captured this 35mm photograph of the Aurora Australis — the Southern Lights — arcing in a crimson crown above the limb of the Earth. Auroras are produced when charged particles from the Sun interact with Earth's magnetic field lines and collide with atmospheric gases, causing them to emit light. The red colour indicates oxygen atoms at high altitudes (above 200 km) being excited by this particle bombardment. From orbit, the aurora appears as a continuous luminous band encircling the polar regions.

Another frame from the STS-39 aurora sequence shows a different character entirely — thin vertical spikes of green aurora rising above a sinuous green airglow band near the horizon. The green airglow is produced by oxygen atoms at around 90 kilometres altitude, excited by ultraviolet solar radiation during the day and slowly releasing that energy as visible light throughout the night. Space Shuttle crews found the aurora one of the most reliably stunning phenomena of low-Earth orbit — constantly changing in shape and colour as the solar wind conditions shifted.

The STS-39 mission was specifically designed, in part, to study auroral phenomena — its primary payload was the Air Force Program 675 shuttle pallet satellite, which deployed instruments to measure aurora spectral and spatial characteristics. This third aurora image from the mission shows a sinuous loop of emission curving over the southern pole, a structure created by the shape of Earth's magnetic field lines channelling charged particles down toward the atmosphere. The combination of mission purpose and extraordinary photographic opportunity made STS-39's aurora archive among the most scientifically valuable in the Space Shuttle program.

On December 24, 1968, Apollo 8 astronaut William Anders took the first colour photograph of Earth rising above the lunar horizon — an image that became one of the most influential photographs ever taken and helped launch the modern environmental movement. This image from a 2013 NASA event commemorating the 45th anniversary uses a new digital visualisation to recreate the moment precisely, reconstructing the spacecraft's exact position and attitude to show what the crew saw as they emerged from behind the Moon. "We came all this way to explore the Moon," Anders later reflected, "and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth."

In February 1974, the crew of Skylab 4 photographed their departing space station from the Command and Service Module as they began their journey home — the last humans to visit Skylab before it was de-orbited in 1979. The image shows the station against a cloud-covered Earth, one solar panel missing after being torn away during launch, the replacement panel installed by the first crew during a daring EVA. Skylab was America's first space station and proved that humans could live and work productively in space for months at a time, paving the way for the International Space Station.

From the International Space Station in June 2014, an Expedition 40 crew member composed this extraordinary image of sunlight illuminating a thunderstorm from below, turning the cloud tops into a glowing orange and gold surface that looks almost geological. The tweet accompanying the image read: "Sun highlights a storm from underneath." At ISS altitude, weather systems become visible as three-dimensional objects, their vertical extent obvious in a way that ground-based radar can only approximate. Hurricane spiral arms, towering cumulonimbus cells, the flat anvils of mature thunderstorms — all become objects of sculptural beauty when seen from above.

On St Patrick's Day 2015, the Expedition 43 crew aboard the ISS photographed Ireland from orbit and posted it to social media with the message: "From space you can see the Emerald Isle is very green!" The photograph shows the island living up to its name in spectacular fashion — almost unnaturally vivid in the low-angled sunlight, surrounded by dark Atlantic water. Images like this one have made the ISS crew's social media accounts among the most followed in science communication, bringing the perspective of orbit to millions of people who will never leave the atmosphere.

During the STS-75 mission in February 1996, the crew of Space Shuttle Columbia took this geographic portrait of Earth, one of thousands of Earth observation images systematically captured during Shuttle missions. STS-75 deployed the Tethered Satellite System — a satellite on a 20-kilometre cable designed to generate electricity from its passage through Earth's magnetic field. The cable broke spectacularly, releasing the satellite into a separate orbit, but the Earth photography program continued uninterrupted, building an archive that atmospheric scientists still use to study long-term climate change.

This daytime Earth observation from Expedition 40 in mid-2014 shows the planet as it appears during most of an orbital pass: blue ocean, white cloud systems, the familiar outlines of coastlines. The ordinariness of the scene is deceptive — every detail visible here represents atmospheric and oceanic processes of staggering complexity. ISS crew members photograph Earth thousands of times during each six-month tour, contributing to databases used by climate scientists, disaster response teams, agricultural researchers, and oceanographers around the world.