The Santa Ana Mountains (dark area in middle of frame) are clearly visible in this image taken from the International Space Station
Astronauts aboard the International Space Station regularly take images of Earth for a variety of reasons. And their attention sometimes turns to Orange County and the rest of Southern California. Here’s a sample of recently released images. (Click images below to enlarge.)
From left to right, starting with first column below, you’re seeing Huntington Beach and Newport Beach, then the Dana Point headlands, then Laguna Beach. In row two, Newport Harbor and Crystal Cove, the San Gabriel River (in far right of the frame) and the airport on Catalina Island. And in the third row, there’s the old blimp hangars in Tustin, another shot of Dana Point, and, lastly, LAX.
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These can’t be recent pictures, but its amazing how clear the pictures are from that high up.
I just flew out of John Wayne and you can almost see the ground.
Hi Bob.
Those photos were taken over the last three years, roughly. The NASA page shows they primarily came from the three most recent crews on space station.
Google Earth has clearer pictures than this.
This isn’t something we see everyday…very interesting.
Go figure, but for the Tustin hangars evidently only coastal oc matters.
Here’s a better headline:
Astronauts photograph costal O.C. from space station
ocreader: Take another look at the photos. You can see the entire county in the first photo and large sections of the county in most of the others.
It would be nice if you posted a link to the NASA site that you got these from so that we could view the full resolution images if we were interested.
In fact it is not too late
Thanks,
Patrick
Great photos. Any idea where I can find a high res copy?
I obtained the photos from http://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/
The images I ran appear to be the highest resolution version available. If you find something better, please let me know.
I can’t find Disneyland in these pictures.
Thanks for the link Gary, I found one of the larger images.
You can request a larger image here.
http://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/scripts/sseop/photo.pl?mission=ISS017&roll=E&frame=10052
And here is the FTP link.
ftp://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/ESC_large_ISS017_ISS017-E-10052.JPG
Hi Patricko. Thanks so much for finding that link.