Astronaut Don Pettit Photographs Mecca’s Sacred Mosque Shining From Space

After returning from a six-month voyage to space, astronaut and enthusiastic photographer Don Pettit has plenty of photos to go through. While Pettit has photographed plenty of celestial objects, he often trains his lens on his home planet below — and recently shared a photo of one of Earth’s most sacred sites.

As he passed over Mecca in Saudi Arabia, he captured the Grand Mosque lit up at night with the Kaaba shining brightest of all in the middle of the frame. “Orbital views of Mecca, Saudi Arabia. The bright spot in the center is the Kaaba, Islam’s holiest site, visible even from space,” Pettit writes on Instagram.

Mecca is the holiest city in Islam and one of the most historically significant places in the world. It is the birthplace of the Prophet Muhammad, and Muslims around the world face the Kaaba during prayer, known as the qibla. The Kaaba is the destination of the Hajj pilgrimage, which every Muslim must carry out at least once in their lifetime if they are physically and financially able.

Pettit took the photo while 400 miles above terra firma, hurtling in low Earth orbit at 17,500 miles per hour. Pettit was presumably inside the space station’s cupola when he pressed the shutter, a European Space Agency-built observatory module.

Because of the speeds involved, Pettit has to use a fast shutter speed to freeze the scenes below, and that is now a viable option because of the improved ISO performance of the Nikon Z9, the camera astronauts use onboard the ISS. It wasn’t always that way, though: During Pettit’s first mission to the ISS in 2022, Pettit invented a barn door tracker from “stuff lying around,” which is a device that counteracts orbital motion in space that allowed photographers to capture sharp images of cities at night.

But Pettit is not limited to capturing cities at night and over the years has captured some of the most iconic shots of space taken from the ISS. He remains an active astronaut and regularly posts his work on social media, including the video below showing “great fleets of fishing boats” in Southeast Asia that are easily mistaken for cities when ISO performance was relatively poor.

Pettit is worth a follow on Instagram and X.

Image credits: NASA / Don Pettit