"The Earth never disappoints," the commander of the International Space Station, Douglas Wheelock, said in an interview this week. Known to his nearly 68,000 Twitter followers as Astro_Wheels, Wheelock has been posting impressive photos of the Earth and some of his thoughts ever since he moved into the space station in June, five months after it got Internet access.
Grand Canyon and the Moon
The floor and walls of a canyon on Mars
Morning over the Himalayas
Rare shot of the moon passing in front of the Solar Dynamics Observatory.
Mercury's Caloris basin
Cassini soars over a crater on Dione.
An 80-foot-wide lunar boulder and its trail
Flying particles along Saturn's B ring
A strand of solar plasma stretches out tens of thousands of miles.
A boulder in the lunar dust.
Wow! Check out this pair of prominences erupting almost 50,000 miles above the surface of the sun
Japan at night
The Grand Canyon up close.
A shot from space.
The Himalayas.
Italy at dusk.
Someone finally pried Douglas Wheelock away from the space station's camera to pose for a mug shot.
A view of Key West, Fla., as seen from the International Space Station.