The world View From International Space Station

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During the past couple of years the visiting crews of the International Space Station (ISS) shot some truly awe-inspiring time-lapse sequences flying over practically every square mile of the globe.

Perhaps not busy enough with my own time-lapse projects, I downloaded the high-resolution image sets made available by the NASA Johnson Space Center and constructed this short time-lapse film.

The film project required the processing of more than 84GB of data (amounting to more than 66K JPEG images). It could be easily appreciated that the astronauts encountered very challenging lighting conditions in orbit. Often, it was necessary for the ISS crew to shoot at high ISO values in order to achieve the desired exposure. In order to get the smooth, contrasty look I was aiming for, I used the tools provided by Adobe Lightroom to increase contrast and drastically reduce the noise in the NASA images. The results speak for themselves, as the opening sequences could almost justify a subtitle like "Alien Earth Edition", such is the surreal nature of these unique views of our home planet from the perspective of the ISS in low earth orbit.

Images courtesy of the Image Science & Analysis Laboratory, NASA Johnson Space Center  Retweet this story