NASA astronaut uploaded photos of Milky Way from International Space Station and they broke the internet

NASA astronaut Don Pettit (@astro_pettit) stands in a chamber lined with electronic shelves, floating scissors and knives, and miscellaneous equipment. From the shelf, he picks up a goblet-shaped cup and redirects it towards his lips. The ivory-colored goblet spins, tosses, and rotates in the gravity-free air, finally reaching Pettit’s mouth, and he guzzles a sip, stunning the viewers watching his video. In the cosmos, everything is stunningly different, not just this cup of coffee. Pettit, who is currently on a six-month mission on the International Space Station (ISS), has been treating his fans to magical views of the Earth and the phenomena happening on it from space. 

While on a space mission, Pettit spends a lot of time gazing out of the window of his spaceship. Over all these years, he has built a striking portfolio of photographs he snapped from space with his camera, which is also why he is now hailed as a prominent astrophotographer by NASA. In one image, which has been viewed 9.8 million times, Pettit shared a captivating view of the Milky Way galaxy. Bursting with a shimmery party of stars, the photo is a book of poetry, a time capsule stolen from the world beyond.

The surreal photo on X, posted in January 2025, comes alive with a radiant aureole of orangish galactic light spurting out from the rim of Earth’s atmosphere and spreading into the black space. As the light from the Milky Way spouts from the Earth’s rim, it emits a coronal band of “burnt umber” that cloaks the planet’s boundary, resulting from the hydroxide emission, as Pettit explained in the post.

Meanwhile, our planet appears to be oozing with a dance of streaky flashes of light appearing parallel to each other. The photograph was taken just before sunrise, from the window of SpaceX’s Dragon Crew-9 capsule.

In another photograph, shared in February this year, Pettit posted a scintillating outer space snap pulsating in greens and yellows. “Cosmic colors at sunrise; never get tired of seeing what the new day brings,” he wrote. The photograph highlights a towering cloud of gassy light spiralling like a helix, an interlocking symphony of blue, red, and light orange, triggered by the scattering of nitrogen molecules, as Pettit explained in a Reddit post. All around it is an endless expanse of dark blue space embellished with zillions of diamond-like stars. Beneath the cloud is a white halo that circles a green auroral pool appearing on the ball of the Earth.

This image was based on “time exposure,” Pettit described. “This image shows horizon views of the Milky Way, atmospheric airglow, aurora, and the soon-to-rise sun over a cloudy Pacific ocean,” he wrote, adding, “The blue-purple emission is commonly seen during the sunrise-sunset phase of orbit.” These photographs were part of Pettit’s ongoing mission. According to NASA Spaceflight, Pettit is currently aboard the Soyuz capsule in the orbiting laboratory at the ISS as the flight engineer of the Expedition 72 crew.