Cape Town collage

ESA astronaut Thomas Pesquet is spending six months on the International Space Station on his Proxima mission. In his free time, like many astronauts, he enjoys looking out of the Cupola windows at Earth. This collage of pictures was taken on 22 January 2017 and shows Cape Town in South Africa.

Thomas asked to have the series of highly zoomed pictures aligned into this collage to show the city in detail. The International Space Station flies at roughly 400 km altitude so Thomas used the longest lens available onboard: 1150 mm.

Thomas took 25 photos of Cape Town in 41 seconds. As the Station circles Earth at 28 800 km/h, the outpost had moved around 328 km to the east by the time he had finished.

On the ground, the images were digitally rotated and assembled into this large collage. Download the high-resolution version to zoom in and explore.