Astronaut Scott Kelly is spending a year on the International Space Station and has been tweeting some incredible, abstract photos of our planet.
Image: Scott Kelly/NASA
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Earth art: Spectacular photos from space
Astronaut Scott Kelly is spending a year on the International Space Station and has been tweeting some incredible abstract photos of our planet.
Image: Scott Kelly/NASA
Blues and greens
The coast and green fields of Southeast Asia.
Image: Scott Kelly/NASA
Africa in abstract
An African landscape from space.
Image: Scott Kelly/NASA
Lake Urmia by morning light
Lake Urmia is a salt lake in northwestern Iran near its border to Turkey. It's protected as a national park.
Image: Scott Kelly/NASA
The Red Sea
The Red Sea from above. Noted for its biodiversity and the desert dust storms that often sweep across it, the salty sea is an inlet of the Indian Ocean, located between Africa and Asia. .
Image: Scott Kelly/NASA
Earth's color palette
A photo taken just south of the oasis town of Awjila in Libya. The town is well known for its high quality dates.
Image: Scott Kelly/NASA
Ice and water
"Patagonia never disappoints," tweeted Scott Kelly. The sparsely populated region at the southern end of South America is home to a range of habitats.
Image: Scott Kelly/NASA
Fiery desert dunes
Desert dunes and soil near Egypt’s Toshka Lakes. The lakes were created in the 1980s and 1990s by the diversion of water from Lake Nasser through a manmade canal into the Sahara Desert.
Image: Scott Kelly/NASA
Watercolors
Tanzania's Lake Kitangiri. The lake is located just south of the Serengeti National Park.
Image: Scott Kelly/NASA
Oil on canvas
From the ground, it might appear that all deserts look pretty much the same. But as Scott Kelly points out, that is not the case from above. "Whenever I think I've seen all the desert scenes Earth has to offer, I see something new and amazing," wrote Kelly on Twitter, when he posted this snap from above Roudkhāneh, Iran.
Image: Scott Kelly/NASA
Salt and soda
Tanzania's Lake Natron is a salt and soda lake close to the Kenyan border. The lake's unusual but beautiful colors result from very high rates of evaporation there.
Image: Scott Kelly/NASA
Blue gem
Cuo Womo Lake in Tibet appears to be the bluest place on earth from the International Space Station, according to Kelly.
Image: Scott Kelly/NASA
Space selfie
Astronaut Scott Kelly takes a selfie on the International Space Station. Kelly is almost 100 days into a mission to investigate the effects of a long stay in space on the human body. The U.S. astronaut regularly posts abstract photos of Earth, asking followers to guess where over the world he is.
Image: Scott Kelly/NASA
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Sometimes a bird's-eye view is what is needed to give those of us on the ground a little perspective. American astronaut Scott Kelly has been tweeting his spectacular photos from high above the Earth in the International Space Station (ISS).
Kelly has an artist's eye. His photos often look like abstract paintings with hues of fiery red and yellows and glowing pinks, blues and greens. They're a reminder of the diversity of the earth's landscapes ranging from arid deserts to tropical rainforests – and of humanity's impact on those landscapes.
Tweeting almost every day with the hashtags #EarthArt and #YearInSpace, Kelly sometimes asks followers to guess where over the world he is as part of a NASA geography competition. All of the astronaut's photos can also be found pinned to an interactive map.
The veteran astronaut, whose twin brother Mark was also in the same line of work, is around 100 days into a year-long mission with cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko to better understand how the human body reacts to the harsh environment of space.
The effects aren't pretty. Long-term weightlessness causes muscle atrophy, bone loss, sleep disturbance and nasal congestion, which is probably good considering excess flatulence is another consequence of space flight. Still, those are some pretty spectacular photographs.
