North is to the right in this highly-oblique image

Jan 27, 2014 15:44 GMT  ·  By

Astronauts with Expedition 38 aboard the International Space Station (ISS) have recently collected this beautiful image of cloud bands flying over the Sahara Desert, in southern Mauritania. The photo was taken at a very oblique angle, emphasizing the massive shadows the clouds cast on the hot sands. 

The photograph was collected from the ISS with a Nikon D3S digital camera sporting a 180-millimeter lens, on January 8. NASA experts have already cropped and re-framed it, before tweaking its contrast and removing all lens artifacts that are endemic to this type of images.

The clouds visible over this portion of the desert were most likely produced by prevailing winds from the northeast (north is to the right in this image). The dunes you can easily see in these images are aligned at roughly right angles to these winds, NASA experts say in a statement.

Much of the sand visible in this image comes from deposits just beneath the bottom border of the photo, where large rivers that sometimes only flow once per decade leave sediments in bulk.