http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/18/San_Francisco_Bay_Area_Skyline_Blvd.jpg

Green enough for ya?

BTW, Jopa. You can see what the astronauts see by going to one of those IMAX theater shows. And someday soon, HDTVs will bring these views right into your livingroom. Rather than funding a rarely useful space laboratory, NASA should just build a Tv station up there. That way we can all tune in on these views and more. Why should we have to way for them to dole out the pics, piecemeal? Let’s have 24/7 views of earth in glorious HD, so we can all get bored of seeing it.

http://www.ekdahl.org

The last photo is of hurricane Dave, which forced NASA to bring the shuttle to Earth 1 day earlier than originally planned.

I am amazed at how all this seems unreal – so much so that more and more people can’t believe it’s even real – see earlier comments. But NASA is really doing all this! You can see the ISS from Earth with a modest sized telescope, if you know where to look – so it’s really there! And believe me, one day photos of the Apollo landing modules will be taken, and everyone will just go Aaaaaaahhhhhhhh……

Most unfortunate that these things seem unreal, and are done so rarely… For me it’s like we’re going back to the Stone Age, an the Apollo days are becoming some sort of a folk tale, a legend. Sad, very sad…

A few more superb photos from STS-118 and other NASA missions are here: http://tinyurl.com/2xbfoa

For all those wondering about how the photos were lit, the shuttle is in LEO (low earth orbit) and it’s possible to be fully illuminated with the Earth only partially so. There’s only one source of light around here – it’s a giant ball of hydrogen fusing into helium exactly 1 AU from Earth.

And don’t even begin to talk about moonlight — where do you think that light originated?

That’s also a day pass photo. If you see look at the astronauts visor, it appears to be in the ‘down’ position.

NASA also makes these available through their web site.

The nearest pair of stars are Alpha and Proxima Centauri, at a distance of 4.5 light years, and they are visible in the Southern Hemisphere only.

In fact, all of the pictures, except for 3 where I can’t tell what the source of the light is, are being illuminated by the Sun in one form or another. Whether the Sun is directly behind the camera or to the right or to the left or where I don’t think really matters. The point I’m making with my answer is that it wouldn’t be daylight on the Earth without the Sun illuminating it. The Sun is certainly not in the other side ofthe Earth opposite to where most of these pictures were taken (except for #3 where I can’t see the Earth). That’s my final answer.

The answer for why the stars are not visible makes perfectly good sense to me.

Because here on earth, even with the several layers of atmosphere we have, I somehow get very hard shadows and washed out brights when shooting on a clear sky type of day. I would have to use some sort of diffuser to soften the light. Like shooting around trees, holding diffusers above subject, bouncing light from source etc.

Sunlight on a clear day will always have to be diffused in one way or another to reach the type of soft tones and shadows acquired like these images. So if your saying the sun is directly behind them, then what is diffusing the sunlight?

I still say we have no logical answer to the source of light in question.