Lots of aspiring photographers snap photos of dazzling sunsets. But few take photos of the golden hour from 220 miles up like Tim Peake.
The British astronaut spent 186 days orbiting Earth aboard the International Space Station. He snapped thousands of photos of the planet while he was there, and compiled the 150 best shots in Hello, Is This Planet Earth?. (The title was inspired by Peake’s misdial from space when trying to reach a relative.) “Looking through the lens, with the zoomed image, the view from space is incredible,” he says. “It’s amazing to see the scale.”
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As many as six astronauts reside on the space station for months at a time, conducting experiments to help scientists understand the effects of living in space and master techniques like 3-D printing. Peake trained for almost a year before the mission, which included a 10-hour photo course at NASA's Johnson Space Center so he might make a better than decent photo of things like the world's oceans or the continents at night.
For his first photo from space, Peake snapped a pic of the moon. It was ... terrible. "I thought, Tim, you’re gonna have to do better than that," he says. Peake eventually got better and came to love documenting the amazing views. At the start of each day, he checked the route of the 16 orbits the station makes daily, setting his watch to go off when it approached a particularly spectacular feature. He also learned to take advantage of beautiful lighting. “If you can get a nice midday photo of Africa or Australia, the oranges and browns are stunning,” he says. “But there’s nothing nicer than hitting the Andes or the Himalayas at dawn or dusk, with that lovely orange light hitting the white snowcaps.”
https://twitter.com/astro\_timpeake/status/721431928621154304
But taking gorgeous photos from space posed unique challenges. He usually worked with a Nikon D4 attached to a metal arm in front of the 5-by-10 foot Cupola window, providing 360-degree visibility and framed with a black curtain to mask the reflected LED lights in the station. Peake had to frequently clean the lens as dust doesn't fall to the floor in microgravity, and he never got more than 18 months out of a camera before cosmic radiation started creating dead pixels in the photos.
At the end of each workday, Peake and fellow astronaut and photography enthusiast Tim Kopra consulted a paperback Rand McNally World Atlas to identify landmarks in their photos. Peake posted pics to his Twitter, along with quirky captions and a pun or two. “The captions are like a diary, reminding me of what I was doing at the time,” he says. “Each photograph tells a little story.”
Peake returned home in June, 2016, but continues pointing his camera skyward, especially at sunrises and sunsets. “That’s one of the beauties that space has given me—a newfound hobby and appreciation for photography that I didn’t have before,” he says. “Although I’m better at taking them from space.”
Hello, Is This Planet Earth? was released June 6.
