Stunning photo shows an ISS astronaut’s view of nearby galaxies

A new photo shared by NASA offers a glimpse of the breathtaking views from the International Space Station (ISS). The image shows Earth’s colorful airglow as well as two nearby galaxies, collectively called the Magellanic Clouds, which lie just outside our own cosmic neighborhood.

American astronaut Don Pettit captured the image last week from the window of a docked SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule as the ISS flew over the Pacific Ocean. Pettit is known for his orbital astrophotography, which maps everything Star trails Under a docked Soyuz vehicle past Earth to the network of city lights that make it up this sparkling nighttime aerial view from Chicago. On Wednesday, Pettit shared the image above and said it was a long exposure taken “with a homemade tracker that suppresses ISS motion.”

The lower half of the photo shows Earth moving and its bright orange airglow – the layer of light created by chemical reactions in Earth’s upper atmosphere. Above this airglow are two seemingly distant galaxies: the Large Magellanic Cloud (left) and the Small Magellanic Cloud (right). In fact, these dwarf satellite galaxies are the closest galaxies to the Milky Way. The Large Magellanic Cloud is about 160,000 light-years away, while the Small Magellanic Cloud is 200,000 light-years away. For comparison, our nearest large galaxy is the Andromeda Galaxy, which is a whopping 2.9 million light-years from the Milky Way.

On Earth, the Magellanic Clouds can only be seen from the Southern Hemisphere (although they are so bright that they are visible to the naked eye). But aboard the ISS, astronauts can catch a glimpse of the galaxy duo whenever the station ventures into the nighttime Southern Hemisphere. Under the right conditions, this can mean multiple Magellanic Clouds sightings in a single day.

From his Crew Dragon window, Pettit also captured a stunning image of the Milky Way, which NASA shared via X (formerly Twitter) last week. The image shows a fraction of the galaxy’s billions of stars, as well as a fainter airglow and an Earth covered in soft green light.