NASA astronaut Scott Kelly has attracted over 700,000 followers on Twitter by regularly sharing beautiful snapshots of Earth, as seen from the International Space Station.
Over the past few days, however, Kelly has been photographing something a little closer to his home: the first flowers ever grown in space.
You've probably seen countless photos by now of astronauts working inside and outside the International Space Station, but sometimes it's hard to get a sense of scale when the photos don't show much of the station. If you'd like an idea of just how big the station is, check out this photo of American astronaut Kjell Lindgren working on it.
Apollo 15 was the 4th NASA mission to land astronauts on the moon. On the way home in early …
Here's a portrait of Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko posing with Nikon DSLR gear on the International Space Station on October 6th, 2015. Tens of thousands of dollars in camera equipment is stored on the walls of Zvezda, the Russian service module in the ISS. As you can see, there are lens mounts fixed to the walls of the module for storing the collection of glass.
People are having fun remixing those 8,400 Apollo moon mission photos that were uploaded to Flickr last week. A couple of days ago, we shared a video that brought the photos to life with faux slow-motion that was added with Photoshop and After Effects.
The video above is another interesting remix. It's the photo set turned into a 3-minute stop-motion video that shows the astronauts journey to the moon and back.
Did you know the International Space Station has a RED Epic Dragon in its camera arsenal now? The 6K camera was delivered to the station back in January 2015, allowing astronauts to capture footage at 300 frames per second and 6 times more detail than before.
To show off their new recording abilities, astronauts have posted a couple of videos in which they play with floating orbs of water in the microgravity environment of space. The experiments have been a hit: the 1-minute video above has gotten nearly half a million views in just the past few days.
Last week, a treasure trove of 8,400 photos by Apollo astronauts was uploaded to Flickr, making the …
Want to browse the entire collection of photos captured on the moon by Apollo astronauts with their chest-mounted Hasselblad cameras? You can now do so right on Flickr.
The Project Apollo Archive has uploaded over 8,400 high-resolution scans of photos shot by Apollo astronauts during trips to the moon.
Back in 2009, Samantha Cristoforetti was selected by the European Space Agency to become Italy's first female astronaut. She went on to spend 200 days aboard the International Space Station, setting the record for the longest continuous space flight by a woman.
If you're interested in space travel yourself, you should take a look at Cristoforetti's Flickr account, where she has been faithfully documenting the things she sees and experiences.
Want to see what it's like to "walk" around in space outside the International Space Station? NASA wants to show you. The agency recently strapped GoPro cameras onto two astronauts to capture the wonder of spacewalks from their perspective.
Photographs captured from the International Space Station have gotten a lot of press in recent years, especially as social networking has helped to share them with a wider audience. Quite a few time-lapses have been made as well using those photos.
Usually those videos are created by video editors who combine all kinds of photos found on space agency websites. The video above is a bit different: it was created with photos captured by a single person: astronaut Alexander Gerst.
Check out this gorgeous short film in which NASA astronaut Don Pettit shares what it was like to photograph Earth from orbit in the International Space Station. During his time aboard the station, Pettit became one of the most prolific astronaut photographers in the history of space exploration -- one time he clogged up data transfers for three days with photos from a 30-minute shoot.
You know those pictures of astronauts on the ISS, working away at some experiment or another while somebody else takes their picture? Well, somebody else might not have actually been involved.
Space camera collectors and space camera admirers grab your bibs and prepare for some serious drooling. Seven months after that Hasselblad that may or may not have gone to the moon and back snagged a whopping $90K at a WestLicht auction, another intriguing but this time very official Hassy is on the auction block again.
The camera and attached ZEISS lens are the very first Hasselblad and ZEISS in space, and RR Auction in Boston has gone to great lengths to prove that these items are legitimate.
While taking the first of three scheduled spacewalks aboard the International Space Station this month, the Expedition 41 team decided to make the most of their 6 hour and 13 minute spacewalk by taking some incredible photographs of their mission. Beforehand though, they made sure to turn the camera on themselves, capturing a few self portraits while hanging around outside of their vehicle almost 100 miles above Earth’s surface.
The 2014 Perseid meteor shower will peak this week, and astrophotographers the world over will be gazing up at the skies, cameras contending with a very bright moon in the hopes of capturing some bright streaks across the sky.
And while some of them will undoubtedly succeed in capturing some stunning shots, there's one view not a single one will be able to get... the view of a meteor shower from above.
Astronaut Reid Wiseman took one small upload for man and one giant leap for Vine's marketing department yesterday when he uploaded the first ever Vine from space. But the Vine is just a small, headline worthy piece of what Wiseman has been uploading from space.
How are these Apollo 17 astronauts riding around in their buggy on the moon without their spacesuits? You might wonder. Well, they’re not. This photograph, captured in 1971, shows the astronauts taking their buggy for some field training test drives on Hawaii’s Big Island.
Say you're a space enthusiast; and say you find yourself bidding on an old Russian high altitude spacesuit; and then, say you win that auction. What would you, as a skilled photographer with a brand new, awesome prop on hand, do with it?
We can't speak for you, but we can show you what photographer Tim Dodd did, and it's just plain fun.
Taking one small step for photography (or is it 'a photography'?) and one giant leap for Instagram, the first Instagram post from space was posted this past Monday by an astronaut currently residing at the International Space Station.
NASA astronaut Rick Mastracchio just arrived on the ISS last week (with the Olympic torch in tow, no less), and even though he wasn't one of the astronauts who got to take the Olympic torch for a spacewalk/photo shoot, he wasted no time starting to upload photos from orbit.
All of the photos he's uploaded (gallery below) are awesome for one reason or another, but one in particular has gotten a bunch of attention. Uploaded yesterday, the photo above shows the view Mastracchio and his fellow astronauts have while exercising on the ISS.
If you've gone to see the blockbuster hit Gravity in theaters, you'll recall several moments when Sandra Bullock's character nearly lost something into the abyss of space -- be it a drill or a screw, everything needs to be strapped down because the slightest movement will send it careening into the unknown.
Well, that was Hollywood, but the real deal did actually happened to astronaut Sunita Williams back in 2006 when her camera just up and floated away from her during a 7-hour space walk.
One of the key challenges in environmental portraiture is finding the right balance between subject and setting. Zoom in too close, and you lose the magic of location. Too wide, and it's not a portrait anymore.
There are times, however, when you have to forget the rules. Like when you're orbiting 150 miles above the Earth and one of your colleagues is about to take the first ever untethered space walk.
When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped out onto the surface of the Moon, it wasn’t technically a military triumph, but it might as well have been. On July 20, 1969, the United States effectively routed the Soviet Union in the Cold War conquest of space. The suits that the astronauts wore, with the Stars and Strips splashed across the left shoulder, left no doubt as to who the victors were.
Hey aspiring storm chasers -- want to dramatically improve your lightning shots? Try getting an elevated view. Like about 400 miles up. That's the approximate orbital height above Earth of the International Space Station, which is producing an impressive library of images showing what lightning looks like from way above.
NASA's Image of the Day today is a photograph showing one of the best photo op spots to be found on the International Space Station: the Cupola module. The image (shown above) shows astronaut and flight engineer Chris Cassidy pointing a Nikon DSLR and 400mm lens out one of the Cupola's windows to photograph some location on Earth 250 miles below him.
Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield has been serving as one of the International Space Station's resident photographers. Every day he posts beautiful photographs showing what our planet looks like from orbit to his Twitter account, @cmdr_hadfield.
Today the Canadian Space Agency released the video above, in which Hadfield takes the time to explain how to best photograph Earth's landscape from 400km (~250 miles) above the surface.
We shared this time-lapse by photographer Bruce W. Berry yesterday in a post about NASA astronaut photography from the International Space Station, but we'd like to share about it a little more about it since it's something that definitely deserves its own post.
NASA’s Space Shuttle Discovery’s first launch was back on August 30th, 1984 from …
We've seen photography of the Moon, and photography taken on the Moon; people have even left photography gear up there. But this is the first we've heard of a photo from Earth, not only making it to the Moon, but staying there.
Fortunately, it was left there on purpose (Can you imagine? "Uhhh ... John ... we need to turn around, I forgot something..."), and the story behind the picture goes something like this.
Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield is a bit of a space celebrity. Some of his hobbies include tweeting back and forth with William Shatner, posting recordings from space on SoundCloud, and even beaming down the occasional video of himself playing the guitar.
Photographs captured by astronauts on the International Space Station are in the public domain, so they're often remixed into gorgeous time-lapse videos. Italian filmmaker Giacomo Sardelli went a step beyond many of the ISS time-lapses we've seen by adding in more than just epic music: he included short audio messages recorded by the astronauts who worked in the space station.
For his project titled "Alienation," Italian photographer Graziano Panfili shot portraits of ordinary people wearing space suits in ordinary locations. Subjects are seen standing or sitting in places such as elevators, bedrooms, bathrooms, and basements.
Want to know how astronauts photograph in space? Just ask Donald Pettit, NASA astronaut and “amateur” photographer. Donald Pettit has called the International Space Station home for over 370 days, and in that time he’s captured some of the most mind-blowing photos of space – and Earth – we’ve ever seen.
Earlier this month we shared some neat photos of astronauts using DSLRs while on spacewalks outside the International Space Station. In case you're also wondering how the cameras are used inside the habitable satellite, we've carefully perused NASA's 2Explore Flickr photo stream in search of those photos as well, and have collected them here in one place for your viewing pleasure. They've got some pretty nice gear up in the ISS... lucky astronauts.
Neil Armstrong passed away this past Saturday at the age of 82. In addition to being the first man to walk on the moon, he was also the first photographer to set foot on that hunk of rock 238,900 miles away. Armstrong and fellow astronaut Buzz Aldrin snapped a total of 122 70mm color photographs using modified Hasselblad 500EL cameras during their short visit on July 21, 1969. However, not all of them were pretty.
American Photo magazine writes that the photographic record left by those two men shows a very human picture of that first landing. Some of the "dud" photos show accidental shutter preses, focusing errors, lens flare, and even photobombed landscape shots.
There's an abandoned McDonalds in California that's stuffed with 48,000 pounds of 70mm tape. These tapes contain never-before-seen ultra-high-res photographs of the moon shot by the Lunar Orbiter project 40 years ago. Rather than ship the film back to Earth, scientists decided to scan them on the spaceship, beam them back losslessly, and then record the data onto magnetic tape. Not wanting to reveal the precision of its spy satellites, the US government decided to mark the images as classified.
Ever wonder what camera gear NASA astronaut Don Pettit uses to shoot his amazing photographs from the International Space Station? Here's a portrait of Don floating around on with his massive collection of Nikon DSLRs and lenses. How much of the gear can you identify?
It might not be very applicable to the vast majority of photographers, but NASA astronaut Captain Alan Pointdexter has written up a fascinating article over on Luminous Landscape in which he shares advice about doing photography in space. Taking photos on the ground is one thing, but imagine using not just the sun, but the earth itself as a source of light.
Here's a fascinating video by NASA that explains what auroras are and what they look like from space. It's filled with beautiful photographs and time-lapse sequences captured by astronauts on the International Space Station. Astronaut photographer Don Pettit, who maintains a blog about his experiences, writes that taking pictures of Earth is harder than it looks.