Don Pettit’s been snapping away in orbit again. This time, the NASA astronaut has captured a stunning image of the Milky Way from the International Space Station (ISS) . It also features Earth and city lights some 250 miles below the orbital outpost.
Starry starry night from an orbital palette pic.twitter.com/YpFVIEMzO9
— Don Pettit (@astro_Pettit) February 15, 2025
Sharing it on social media on Sunday, the epic image quickly picked up a lot of likes and positive comments.
One contributor wrote: “If I saw this in person I’d never want to return to Earth. Simply stunning,” while another described it as “cosmic strokes on a celestial canvas.”
The image follows a similarly striking shot (below) posted by Pettit last week, captured from inside a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule currently docked at the space station.
Star field from @Space_Station. Taken from the SpaceX Crew 9 Dragon vehicle showing the Southern Cross region using my homemade star tracker. Big thanks to @BabakTafreshi for doing the image processing I can’t do on orbit. pic.twitter.com/Tx4SmHXUXk
— Don Pettit (@astro_Pettit) February 12, 2025
The “star tracker” that Pettit refers to is a device that he co-designed and built to capture long-exposure, blur-free photographs of stars. The device works by rotating the camera at the same rate as the station’s orbit — once every 90 minutes — compensating for the station’s motion to enable sharp photos of distant stars.
Since arriving at the ISS in September last year, Pettit has been showing off his photography skills by posting a slew of impressive images of Earth and beyond.
One of his most stunning efforts is of rivers in the Amazon Basin, which he described as looking like “flowing silver snakes.” He also captured the recent maiden launch of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket in a somewhat surreal image, and photographed a Crew Dragon capsule as it returned to Earth at high speed at the end of the historic Polaris Dawn mission.
Pettit recently took part in a Q&A session from the ISS in which he talked about what it’s like to take photos of Earth from inside the space-based facility, while he has also performed the coolest camera lens swap you’ll ever see — thanks to microgravity.
After 13 suborbital test flights and more than $15 billion in development costs, SpaceX's Starship has finally reached orbit. The 407-foot megarocket, the most powerful ever built, lifted off from Starbase, Texas, on Monday and delivered its first real payload on it's 14th attempt. The celebration came with an asterisk, though, since SpaceX had to cut the planned 10-hour mission to roughly three hours.
https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/2104601695711904180
SpaceX is finally ready to give Starship its biggest test yet. The company says the massive rocket's 14th test flight is scheduled for September 22, when it will attempt to put the upper stage into Earth orbit for the first time. The launch is currently pending regulatory approval, with a 75-minute window opening at 7:15 a.m. CT.
Starship has 26 Starlink satellites to deliver
For decades, humanity has looked up at the Moon and wondered what it would be like to live on it. Think sprawling cities, factories, research centers, and permanent human settlements. Unfortunately, there is one fairly fundamental problem with that vision.
A new study published in Frontiers in Space Technologies argues that even the Moon's potentially enormous reserves of frozen water may be nowhere near enough to support city-sized populations sustainably. Researchers Martin Elvis and Jonathan McDowell estimate that the permanently shadowed regions near the lunar poles could contain roughly one billion tons of water. It sounds like an extraordinary amount until you put a million thirsty humans next to it.