André Kuipers:

1. England, Paris, Belgium, The Netherlands, Denmark, Germany and the Northern Lights over the polar region. 11th February 2012.
2. “Last night”: Nile, Egypt, Israel, Arabian Peninsula, Lebanon, Syria, Turkey. Sunrise in the east. 18th of March 2012.
Via Flickr. Taken from the International Space Station, Expedition 30. 
Credit: ESA/NASA

I read Charles Darwin’s The Origin of the Species as a very young kid and like so many others, I fell completely enamoured by the diversity of our planet. Here’s a couple of pictures of the Galapagos Islands from space, by André Kuipers. He writes: 

The Galapagos islands, one of the most famous, scientifically historic places on our planet.

Taken from the International Space Station, Expedition 30, on the 28th April 2012.

Via Flickr. Credit: ESA/NASA.

Watch a time lapse video of our planet from space: The Journey Home From the International Space Station. It is absolutely breath taking. I love this so much I’m sharing it all over the place.

Ron Garan, the space-tweeting NASA astronaut who returned in September from five-and-a-half-months aboard the International Space Station (ISS), released a video on Monday that he says “is about as close as we can come to show what astronauts see in space”…

To make the video, Garan and [astronaut Mike] Fossum set DSLR cameras to take one picture about every three seconds. Garan says that even though the ISS is traveling at a speed of 17,500 mph, time-lapse photography gives the impression that the space station is traveling even faster.

Music by Peter Gabriel.

Via The Huffington Post.