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NASA Astronaut Shares Breathtaking Photos From the ISS, Featuring Galaxies and Glowing ‘Star Trails’

On his fourth flight, Don Pettit is once again sharing the art of astrophotography, capturing and posting pictures of Earth, satellites and space

Margherita Bassi

Daily Correspondent

Image recently captured by Don Pettit
The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds were recently captured by NASA astronaut Don Pettit aboard the ISS. Don Pettit / NASA, via X

NASA astronaut Don Pettit has done it again: captured a breathtaking image from aboard the International Space Station (ISS) that makes viewers on Earth feel a bit closer to space.

“In space, you can see stars!” he wrote in an X post last week. “I flew a home-made tracking device that allows time exposures required to photograph star fields. Stay tuned for more photos like this.”

The image in question displays two cloudy galaxies above the orange glow of Earth’s atmosphere on a brilliant stellar backdrop. Those celestial bodies at center stage are the Large Magellanic Cloud and the Small Magellanic Cloud, a pair of dwarf galaxies. Pettit captured the long-exposure photograph from the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule docked at the ISS.

“Images from space help tell the story to people on Earth that don’t have the opportunity to go into space,” Pettit says to NASASpaceFlight.com. In addition to preserving memories, “the photographs help complete the story of what it means for human beings to expand into space and expand into this frontier.”

Pettit and two Russian cosmonauts arrived at the ISS in September aboard a Russian Soyuz crew capsule that launched from Kazakhstan, but this is far from his first rodeo. At age 69, Pettit is NASA’s oldest active astronaut. He boasts more than 370 days in space and over 13 hours of spacewalk time, per NASA—as well as a stunning portfolio of space photography developed during his three previous spaceflights. In fact, despite Pettit’s other achievements—including inventing a “zero-g coffee cup”—he might be best known to the average person for the stunning images he regularly shares with the public.

Before returning to space for his current mission, Pettit said he was excited to build on his photography skills. “We’ve got a number of new lenses on orbit that are optimized for nighttime imagery. I’m really looking forward to getting back on station and taking nighttime imagery to a new level,” he told Space.com’s Elizabeth Howell prior to launching in September.

At the ISS, most crew members have their own cameras, and additional cameras are permanently staged by the windows, Pettit told CNN’s Kyle Almond in 2018. When something photo-worthy happens, a camera is often close by. But astronauts have to be quick to get a good shot.

“You have maybe three or four seconds to get that shot, or your orbital position will change and it won’t be the composition you really wanted,” Pettit told CNN. “So you have to be ready. We never turn our cameras off, and if you have a (memory) card that’s getting full we’ll change it out. We’ll make sure the batteries are fresh. If you need a camera, you just grab the camera off the Velcro tab it’s stuck on and start shooting.”

Recently, the astronaut has shared a number of images featuring events on Earth and in space. He captured the sixth flight test of SpaceX’s Starship rocket, the reflections of Starlink satellites and comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS.

Pettit uses a variety of techniques to take his photographs, including time exposure, infrared and multiple cameras, according to NASA, in addition to a home-made tracker, a device used for astrophotography that counteracts the movement of the ISS and celestial bodies.

In addition to the potentially short time window to capture a shot, photographers in space also need to grapple with exposure issues caused by an extreme range of brightness that isn’t normally a problem on Earth. Pettit, however, is now something of an expert, having taken his photography from a childhood passion all the way to writing a guide for other ISS astronauts interested in space photography, per CNN.

“As the International Space Station and private companies like SpaceX continue to expand humanity’s presence in low-Earth orbit, astronauts like Pettit are playing a crucial role in shaping how we perceive the universe,” Lydia Amazouz writes for Daily Galaxy. “Pettit’s work, in particular, shows that even as space technology advances, the human touch remains an invaluable component in our quest for cosmic understanding.”

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Margherita Bassi

Margherita Bassi is a freelance journalist and trilingual storyteller. Her work has appeared in publications including BBC Travel, Discover magazine, Live Science, Atlas Obscura and Hidden Compass.