19 Stunning Photos Taken From Space That Will Make You Feel Really Small

Though movies like Gravity and Interstellar used a lot of special effects in their making, the end-product showed a beautiful view of space. Have you ever wished that you could go into space? Without having to go through years of studying equations, physics, gravity and what not? Here are some stunning images taken in space, that will blow your mind!

1. Imagine waking up to this sunrise everyday

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Astronaut Reid Wiseman tweeted this image in September 2014, saying ” just past #sunrise over the ocean”. The station crew on ISS sees, on average, sixteen sunrises and sunsets during a 24-hour orbital period.

 

2. Florida at night!

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Astronauts aboard the International Space Station took this photograph of Florida in October 2014. The peninsula is highly recognizable even at night, especially when looking roughly north. Illuminated areas give a strong sense of the size of cities. The brightest continuous patch of lights is the Miami-Fort Lauderdale metropolitan area, the largest urban area in the southeastern U.S. and home to 5.6 million people.

 

3. A bird’s eye view of the Andromeda galaxy

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The Andromeda Galaxy is a spiral galaxy approximately 2.5 million light years from Earth. In approximately 4.5 billion years the Andromeda Galaxy and the Milky Way are expected to collide and the result will be a giant elliptical galaxy. It’s diameter is 260,000 light-years, and it contains 1 trillion stars.

 

4. An aerial view of the area near Yellowstone National Park

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This image was tweeted by astronaut Reid Wiseman in November 2014. Wiseman was part of the Expedition 40/41 International Space Station crew. The mission was six months in duration and lasted from May to November 2014. Wiseman launched at 19:57 UTC on 28 May 2014.

 

5. The Sun’s Canyon of Fire

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In September 2013, a 200,000 mile long filament ripped through the sun’s atmosphere, the corona, leaving behind what looks like a canyon of fire. The glowing canyon traces the channel where magnetic fields held the filament aloft before the explosion. In reality, the sun is not made of fire, but of something called plasma: particles so hot that their electrons have boiled off, creating a charged gas that is interwoven with magnetic fields. This image was captured on Sept. 29-30, 2013, by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, which constantly observes the sun in a variety of wavelengths.

 

6. The distance between the earth and the moon

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The distance between the Moon and Earth varies from around 356,400 km to 406,700 km at the extreme perigees (closest) and apogees (farthest). Apollo missions took about three days to reach the moon.

 

7. Close-up view of the eye of Hurricane Isabel

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This photo, taken by one of the Expedition 7 crewmembers onboard the ISS,  shows the spiral structure and even the eye of the hurricane. At the time this photo was Isabel had reformed to a Category 5 storm, packing winds of 160 miles per hour. Isabel was the deadliest and also the most costly hurricane in 2003. North Carolina was hugely affected by this Hurricane where thousands of homes were damaged and destroyed. The path of Isabel caused 16 deaths in seven US states, and around 5.7 billion dollars of damage.

 

8. Buzz Aldrin on the moon (1969)

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Buzz Aldrin is an American engineer and former astronaut, and the second person to walk on the moon. He was the Lunar Module Pilot on Apollo 11, the first manned lunar landing in history. He set foot on the Moon at 03:15:16 (UTC) on July 21, 1969, following mission commander Neil Armstrong.

 

9. “Pillars of Creation”

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Pillars of Creation” is a photograph taken by the Hubble Space Telescope of elephant trunks of interstellar gas and dust in the Eagle Nebula, some 7,000 light years from Earth. They are so named because the gas and dust are in the process of creating new stars, while also being eroded by the light from nearby stars that have recently formed.

 

10.  A nighttime image of the Atlantic coast of the United States

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A member of the International Space Station’s Expedition 30 crew snapped this image on Feb. 6, 2012. Parts of two Russian spacecraft parked at the orbiting outpost can also be seen in the left foreground.

 

11. Cloud formation over the Indonesian island of Flores

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On December 2, 2013 the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) aboard NASA’s Aqua satellite flew over Indonesia and captured this true-color image of spectacular clouds rising over the landscape.

 

12. Collision of two galaxies

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This image of the Antennae galaxies is the sharpest yet of this merging pair of galaxies. During the course of the collision, billions of stars will be formed.

 

13. Sunset on Mars

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On May 19, 2005, NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Spirit captured this stunning view as the Sun sank below the rim of Gusev crater on Mars. This Panoramic Camera mosaic was taken around 6:07 in the evening of the rover’s 489th Martian day, or sol.

 

14. This image contains an estimated 10,000 galaxies

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The Hubble Ultra-Deep Field (HUDF) is an image of a small region of space in the constellation Fornax, composited from Hubble Space Telescope data accumulated over a period from September 24, 2003, through to January 16, 2004.

 

15. Dust and clouds over the Sahara desert

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The Sahara contributes more dust to the atmosphere than any other desert. Saharan dust accounts for more than half the dust settling on the ocean and helps fertilize land in the Americas. This image, taken by ESA astronaut Alex Gerst on the ISS, shows that the land surface is almost entirely obscured by dust.

 

16. Holuhraun eruption, Iceland

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This image has been taken by the Landsat 8 satellite. Until 2014, the surface of the lava field was of an older lava flow, which had erupted from a vent associated with Askja in 1797. In the early hours of 29 August 2014, a small fissure eruption occurred in Holuhraun. By 4 September, the total area of the lava flow was estimated at 10.8 km2

 

17. Hurricane Edouard, Atlantic ocean

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This was taken by NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman from the ISS.

 

18. The Aurora Australis or Southern Lights

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The Aurora Australis or Southern Lights shimmer over the Indian Ocean on 17 September, 2011. Auroras are light shows provoked by energy from the Sun and fuelled by electrically-charged particles trapped in Earth’s magnetic field, or magnetosphere.

 

19. A plume of smoke and dust rises from lower Manhattan after the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre were attacked

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This image of the terrorist attack in the United States on September 11, 2001, was taken by astronaut Frank Culbertson who was aboard the International Space Station at the time .

Did you know that a day on Venus is longer than a year?

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