ISS astronauts shot more than a million photos until now

Apr 3, 2013 18:21 GMT  ·  By

Space is a great place to be, well, at least if you're tucked safely inside something like the International Space Station. Strangely but understandably perhaps, when you're in space, you'll spend quite a lot of time looking back at Earth.

At least that's what most astronauts do, judging by the things they photograph. Nate Bergey put together several graphs indicating the coordinates of every photo any astronaut has ever shot aboard the ISS, across the almost 35 missions to date, as long as the photos were archived and had location data, most do.

It's made up of over one million spots, representing over one million photos. With so many data points, a familiar image emerges, the shape of the continents. It makes sense too, astronauts are going to prefer shooting locations on land not the vast blue ocean.

There's more to be uncovered from the data, for example, a lot of the photos come from recent expeditions.

You'll notice a lot of purple in the second image, that's due to the timelapse videos astronaut Don Pettit put together during Expedition 30/31, timelapses made up of hundreds of images shot at constant intervals through several orbits of the Earth. More than 400,000 of the images were shot during Expedition 30/31.

All ISS photos (2 Images)

(almost) All the photos ever shot from the ISS plotted
All the photos broken down by expedition
Open gallery