14 DAY TRIAL // Astronauts with the Expedition 38 crew aboard the International Space Station snapped this image of Lake Sharpe, on the Missouri River, on December 26, 2013, using a Nikon D3X digital camera with a 1,000-millimeter lens. The photo was processed at the NASA Johnson Space Center, in Houston, Texas, to remove artifacts and enhance contrast.
ISS astronauts regularly take images of various objects or landscape features on the surface of the planet, before delivering them to the JSC Image Science & Analysis Laboratory, as part of the ISS Crew Earth Observations experiment.
Lake Sharpe is not really a lake, in the sense that it is part of a flowing river. It is basically a 130-kilometer (80-mile) reservoir that developed behind the so-called Big Bend Damn, which is built in Lower Brule, in South Dakota. The lake was completely frozen over at the end of last year.
It occupies a large meander in the course of the Missouri River, which is renowned for its inability to flow straight from western Montana to its confluence with the Mississippi, a short distance north of St. Louis. The Missouri River predominately flows to the southeast, but makes huge bends that lead to the formation of U-shaped inclusions. These generally make for fertile lands, and are used in agriculture.