Stunning Views of Earth From the International Space Station

The Blue Marble… The Pale Blue Dot… that magnificent Overview Effect… This is what our astronauts experience from the International Space Station, and what we get to see via videos like this, and this, and this, and the one above. From The New York Times, Earth, the Marvelous Blue Orb:

Sometimes you have to leave a place to appreciate it…

One of the little-known benefits of the space station is that it is at just the right altitude to photograph things on Earth. Every week the astronauts aboard the space station record images of things that would spew headlines if we saw them on any one of the thousands of planets that we now know circle other stars.