André Kuipers is a European Space Agency astronaut from The Netherlands who has spent a lot of time on the International Space Station. He is the only Dutchman to make two space flights. He was recently on the ISS when the first privately owned and operated space capsule, the SpaceX Dragon, docked with ISS.
Kuipers takes amazing photographs of Earth, the Moon and other satellites from an observation cupola with a bunch of windows using a Nikon camera.
Top Ten Andre Kuipers Space Photos
Though the Richat Structure looks like a crater or volcano it is actually a dome of rock that has been eroded away to look like the familiar concentric rings of a crater.
The Richat Structure, also known as the Eye of the Sahara and Guelb er Richat, is a prominent circular feature in the Sahara desert of west–central Mauritania near Ouadane. This structure is a deeply eroded, slightly elliptical, 40-km in diameter, dome. [Wikipedia]
The photo above of Lake Rason, Australia was originally identified by a commenter on the Kuipers’ Flickr Photo as Lago Puarun, in Peru.
While the two look vaguely the same, Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy didn’t think it was right. So he took the time stamp of the photo (exactly 05:58 UTC) and found out via WolframAlpha that the ISS was actually over Australia at the time, far from Peru. He then searched Google Maps and found the actual subject of Kuipers’ image (see below). How awesome is it that you can find the position of the ISS just by asking WolframAlpha? (pretty awesome)
Connect with Andre Kuipers to see all of his images.
-Mike
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