When retired Canadian Space Agency astronaut, Chris Hadfield, was aboard the International Space Station for the final time, he made the most of it.
From December 2012 to May 2013, Hadfield orbited Earth 2,597 times and took nearly 45,000 photographs of Earth from the International Space Station. His Twitter stream of photos catapulted him to popularity — he now has more than a million followers.
Hadfield compiled some of his favorite photographs in his new book "You Are Here: Around the World in 92 Minutes."
In the book's introduction he writes about Earth: "You are here — we all are — for life. Let's get to know the place a little better." With these stunning images he captured of our planet, you can.
This incredible image depicts clouds twisting into a clockwise, rotating vortex near Africa, Chile in South America, which Hadfield describes as a "a continent of repeating patterns and exaggerated contradictions." The distinct swirls form when currents in the cold Pacific Ocean combine with atmospheric winds. The vortex rotates clockwise because it's in the southern hemisphere.
"The human impulse to impose order on Nature is apparent everywhere in North America," Hadfield writes. Here, he shows a stretch of the Detroit River separating Detroit, Michigan on the right from Ontario, Canada on the left.
The Great Salt Lake in Utah is the largest saline lake in the western hemisphere. "No perspective is more radically different than the one you get when you leave the planet altogether and look back," Hadfield writes. And this is certainly true here, where you can see some of the saltiest parts of the lake in red where brine shrimp are raised and magnesium-chloride brine is extracted to produce magnesium metal.
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