Cmdr Chris Hadfield's photo of Belfast, Northern Ireland, taken aboard the International Space Station
Cmdr Chris Hadfield, the Canadian astronaut aboard the International Space Station (ISS) who has been snapping photos of Earth and sharing them on Twitter, has captured another shot over the island of Ireland – Belfast, in this case.
“Belfast, Northern Ireland. The distinctive, historic harbor stands out clearly from orbit,” Hadfield tweeted along with the photo to his nearly half a million followers.
The photo has been retweeted 1,070 times and favourited 580 times at time of writing.
Hadfield, who has a daughter studying at Trinity College Dublin, has previously shot and tweeted two photos of the Irish capital. One is a daytime shot of the Dublin area, with Howth clearly visible jutting out to sea, and the other is a photo of Dublin twinkling in the night.
With the nighttime photo, Hadfield provided the first message tweeted from space in Irish: “Tá Éire fíorálainn!” (Ireland is exquisite).
Cmdr Chris Hadfield’s nighttime photo of Dublin
Cmdr Chris Hadfield’s photo of the Dublin coast
Hadfield has been aboard the ISS since December carrying out scientific experiments and performing robotic tasks. He has even put together a space ‘cooking show’.
His mission aboard the space lab that orbits Earth every 92 minutes at 8 km/s is to last five months.
