SMALL PRINT:Shortly after 2am yesterday Douglas H Wheelock shared this view of Ireland at night with the 50,000 or so people who follow his Twitter account. As commander of Expedition 25 on the International Space Station, Wheelock tweets from orbit as @Astro_Wheels while circumnavigating the globe more than a dozen times a day, 425km above Earth at 27,500km/h.
Despite the clarity of the picture, picking out every major town is not as easy as you might expect, as nearly every densely populated area appears to match Kilkenny for wattage. Perhaps more interesting are the swathes of darkness among a constellation of glowing blobs and streaks of speckled orange. The country’s contours are almost perfectly illuminated down the east coast, but there’s little sign of urban sprawl bleeding into Wicklow, while Mayo is invisible and Letterkenny seems to have switched off altogether.
“I’m so impressed at how clear it is,” says Brian O’Connor from Meath, who requested a picture of Ireland via Twitter when he saw Wheelock post a snapshot of the Mediterranean Riviera last week. “It’s amazing when you compare the level of light penetration with what you can see of the UK, or even just the North and the South.”
Wheelock is not the only astronaut to photograph the planet. In fact, one of their tasks is to come up with images for scientific research. The Twitter account @nasa_astronauts aggregates posts from other astronauts to share never-before-seen pictures, such as a typhoon hitting Japan’s Amami Islands or the aurora borealis creeping over northern Europe, as soon as they’re taken.
