Looking down from space station

A magnificent moonlit Aurora light show out over Antarctica


Night lights of Italy

(Sept. 20) -- NASA is famed for its expensive, complicated, high-tech gadgetry, but lately, some astronauts have been resorting to a very down-to-earth medium of communication to share their magnificent views of space with the rest of us earthlings. Just check out the Twitter feed of astronaut Douglas H. Wheelock (@Astro_Wheels), commander of joint U.S. and Russian Expedition 25, the latest rotation of crew on the International Space Station. Beginning Wednesday, Wheelock and his fellow five astronauts will be taking control of the ISS and snapping what are sure to be even more incredible pics of the Earth and the cosmos. Already, he's shared images of the aurora australis from the window of the Russian Soyuz craft that is transporting the astronauts to the station. Of course, as alluded to above, Wheelock and company are hardly the first astronauts to use the microblog to dazzle the public when it comes to space vistas. NASA's Mike Massimino (@Astro_Mike) is credited with being the first to tweet from space on a mission to the Hubble Space Telescope back in spring of 2009, although because of technological constraints, he was unable to tweet in real time and instead had to go through the somewhat cumbersome process of sending an e-mail to Johnson Space Center on the ground, which then posted his tweet to his account. That process hardly curbed astronauts' overall inclinations to tweet, though. Just take a gander at Japanese native Soichi Noguchi's feed (@Astro-Sochi, notice a pattern?), which includes its own set of spectacular space photos. Fortunately, earlier this year, NASA upgraded its software to allow for instantaneous, real-time tweeting, allowing those on the ground to see immediately what's going on up above (just the way the service was meant to be used). Until the new pics start coming in from the ISS, enjoy this gallery of all the best of the ones that have landed so far.



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