Skip to main content

ISS astronaut’s photos capture a ‘wonderful world’

It may not be a perfect world, but if you look in the right places it’s certainly wonderful.

International Space Station (ISS) astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti, for one, definitely thinks so. Inspired by Louis Armstrong’s 1967 classic What a Wonderful World, the Italian space traveler recently posted four sublime Earth images alongside lyrics from the legendary track.

Recommended Videos

“I see skies of blue and clouds of white
The bright blessed days, the dark sacred nights
And I think to myself
What a wonderful world…”#MissionMinerva pic.twitter.com/3cGi1I5Uck

— Samantha Cristoforetti (@AstroSamantha) September 10, 2022

The pictures, captured from the space station as it orbited some 250 miles above our planet, look more like paintings that photographs. Cristoforetti doesn’t say what parts of the world they show, inviting us instead to focus on the sheer beauty of the scenery far below.

During downtime on the ISS, astronauts often like to head to the Cupola module, whose seven windows offer stunning views of Earth and beyond. No doubt these images were taken from that precise place.

While some crew members like to simply gaze out and enjoy the vistas, others grab one of the station’s many cameras, capturing the spectacle to share with their followers on social media.

Cristoforetti, who has more than a million followers on Twitter and around half a million on TikTok, has been posting regular updates during her six-month space mission, which started in April.

Her various posts aim to share different aspects of her life in space and have so far included tips for wannabe astronauts, an explanation of a mysterious bright light on Earth, an image of a lunar eclipse from space, and a time-lapse showing how the sun sometimes doesn’t set for astronauts aboard the station.

She’s also demonstrated how astronauts perform CPR in space, and chatted about how space debris can affect life on the orbiting outpost.

For a bit of fun, she also recreated a moment from the hit Hollywood flick, Gravity.

For more images showing Earth from space, check out this impressive collection captured from the ISS and other spacecraft, including one particular stunner snapped during the historic Apollo 11 mission in 1969.

Trevor Mogg
Contributing Editor
Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…
London sparkles in astronaut’s gorgeous night shot from the ISS
London seen from the ISS.

A gorgeous image captured by a recent arrival at the International Space Station (ISS) shows the night lights of London gleaming 250 miles below.

NASA astronaut Don Pettit -- NASA’s oldest active astronaut at 69 -- arrived at the station last week on his fourth trip to orbit.

Read more
Time-lapse from ISS shows lightning and mysterious red light
Earth in a time-lapse captured from the ISS.

In his final weeks aboard the space station after six months in orbit, NASA astronaut Matthew Dominick has shared a gorgeous time-lapse of Earth.

It shows a large part of Asia as the International Space Station (ISS) passed over it at night at an altitude of about 250 miles. The footage, which you can watch below, shows numerous flashes of lightning over a wide area, bright clusters of city lights, and colored lights from fishing boats, which Dominick describes as “one of my favorite things to see at night from the ISS.” But it also shows a bright red light, the source of which Dominick is unsure about.

Read more
Crew Dragon is about to fly with empty seats for the first time. Here’s why
A Falcon 9 rocket launches from California.

NASA and SpaceX are making final preparations for the Crew-9 astronaut flight to the International Space Station (ISS), which is set to launch from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Thursday, September 26.

But this will be the first of SpaceX’s 13 crewed flights to the ISS since the first one in 2020 where there will be two empty seats on the Crew Dragon spacecraft. And there’s a very good reason for that. Let us explain.

Read more