Blues and greens
The coast and green fields of Southeast Asia.
Africa in abstract
An African landscape from space.
Lake Urmia by morning light
Lake Urmia is a salt lake in northwestern Iran near its border to Turkey. It’s protected as a national park.
The Red Sea
The Red Sea from above. Noted for its biodiversity and the desert dust storms that often sweep across it, the salty sea is an inlet of the Indian Ocean, located between Africa and Asia. .
Earth’s color palette
A photo taken just south of the oasis town of Awjila in Libya. The town is well known for its high quality dates.
Ice and water
“Patagonia never disappoints,” tweeted Scott Kelly. The sparsely populated region at the southern end of South America is home to a range of habitats.
Fiery desert dunes
Desert dunes and soil near Egypt’s Toshka Lakes. The lakes were created in the 1980s and 1990s by the diversion of water from Lake Nasser through a manmade canal into the Sahara Desert.
Watercolors
Tanzania’s Lake Kitangiri. The lake is located just south of the Serengeti National Park.
Oil on canvas
From the ground, it might appear that all deserts look pretty much the same. But as Scott Kelly points out, that is not the case from above. “Whenever I think I’ve seen all the desert scenes Earth has to offer, I see something new and amazing,” wrote Kelly on Twitter, when he posted this snap from above Roudkhāneh, Iran.
Salt and soda
Tanzania’s Lake Natron is a salt and soda lake close to the Kenyan border. The lake’s unusual but beautiful colors result from very high rates of evaporation there.
Blue gem
Cuo Womo Lake in Tibet appears to be the bluest place on earth from the International Space Station, according to Kelly.
Space selfie
Astronaut Scott Kelly takes a selfie on the International Space Station. Kelly is almost 100 days into a mission to investigate the effects of a long stay in space on the human body. The U.S. astronaut regularly posts abstract photos of Earth, asking followers to guess where over the world he is.