London sparkles in astronaut’s gorgeous night shot from the ISS

By Trevor Mogg Published September 19, 2024

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.

“London sparkling at night,” Pettit wrote in a post with the photo, which he shared on X (formerly Twitter) on Wednesday.

London sparkling at night.

Nikon Z9, 200mm f2, 1/320 sec, ISO 25600 pic.twitter.com/okPZz6N05f

— Don Pettit (@astro_Pettit) September 18, 2024

Pettit used a full-frame Nikon Z9 to take the photo. The focal length was 200mm, the aperture f2, speed 1/320 sec, and ISO 25600.

Just a few days after arriving at the ISS, Pettit took an extraordinary photo showing the Polaris Dawn spacecraft entering Earth’s atmosphere at high speed as it returned home with four astronauts at the end of a historic five-day mission.

The American astronaut captured similarly striking shots during his previous visits to the ISS, and so his social media followers can expect to see plenty more wonderful photos over the course of his six-month space mission.

Pettit is particularly adept at capturing dramatic star trail images, like this one taken in 2012 with a Nikon D3s and a 24mm lens and created using multiple stacked 30-second exposures:

Star trail from @Space_Station, with ghostly blue outline of a solar panel.

Multiple atmospheric layers are visible due to solar driven excitation of atomic oxygen (green) and hydroxyl (-OH) radicals (orange-pink). The star trails become curved near the horizon due to the… pic.twitter.com/F9HUVcEf9e

— Don Pettit (@astro_Pettit) July 19, 2024

He also likes to take near-infrared images, like this one captured in 2012 showing a flora-packed river delta (shown in bright magenta) wedged between the Pacific Ocean and the Andes Mountains. This image was taken using a modified Nikon D3s with a 180mm lens set at f/4.5 and ISO 400.

Camana, Peru region in near infrared. Wedged between the Pacific Ocean and the Andes Mountains, this lush flora-packed river delta appears as bright magenta. Camana is the grayish feature in the lower center of the river delta. This is in stark contrast to the sparse foliage in… pic.twitter.com/zXu6Gor1MF

— Don Pettit (@astro_Pettit) September 1, 2024

While most astronauts are happy to simply peer out of the ISS at the stunning scenery several hundred miles below, a few, such as Pettit, Matthew Dominick, and Thomas Pesquet, like to record what they see with a camera. And we’re mighty glad they do.