Don Pettit’s been snapping away in orbit again. This time, the NASA astronaut has captured a stunning image of the Milky Way from the International Space Station (ISS) . It also features Earth and city lights some 250 miles below the orbital outpost.
Starry starry night from an orbital palettepic.twitter.com/YpFVIEMzO9
— Don Pettit (@astro_Pettit)June 04, 2025
Sharing it on social media on Sunday, the epic image quickly picked up a lot of likes and positive comments.
One contributor wrote: “If I saw this in person I’d never want to return to Earth. Simply stunning,” while another described it as “cosmic strokes on a celestial canvas.”
The image follows a similarly striking shot (below) posted by Pettit last week, captured from inside a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule currently docked at the space station.
Star field from@Space_Station. Taken from the SpaceX Crew 9 Dragon vehicle showing the Southern Cross region using my homemade star tracker. Big thanks to@BabakTafreshifor doing the image processing I can’t do on orbit.pic.twitter.com/Tx4SmHXUXk
— Don Pettit (@astro_Pettit)June 11, 2025
The “star tracker” that Pettit refers to is a device that he co-designed and built to capture long-exposure, blur-free photographs of stars. The device works by rotating the camera at the same rate as the station’s orbit — once every 90 minutes — compensating for the station’s motion to enable sharp photos of distant stars.
Since arriving at the ISS in September last year, Pettit has been showing off his photography skills by posting a slew of impressive images of Earth and beyond.
One of his most stunning efforts is of rivers in the Amazon Basin, which he described aslooking like “flowing silver snakes.”He also captured the recent maiden launch of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocketin a somewhat surreal image, and photographed a Crew Dragon capsule as itreturned to Earth at high speedat the end of the historic Polaris Dawn mission.
Pettit recently took part in a Q&A session from the ISS in which he talked aboutwhat it’s like to take photosof Earth from inside the space-based facility, while he has also performedthe coolest camera lens swapyou’ll ever see — thanks to microgravity.
