Astronaut Captures Predawn View of Midwest City Lights from the Space Station
An astronaut aboard the International Space Station photographed illuminated cities across the U.S. Midwest under clear predawn skies on October 18, 2026, in an image NASA highlighted for its value in tracking how the built environment changes over time.
NASA
Clear skies over much of the eastern United States in the predawn hours of October 18, 2026, gave an astronaut aboard the International Space Station an unobstructed view of the country at night. The astronaut captured a wide-angle photograph at 4:54 a.m. Central Daylight Time, or 09:54 Universal Time, showing illuminated cities large and small spread across the darkened landscape.
The Midwest's largest metropolitan areas, including Chicago, Illinois, and Detroit, Michigan, stand out as some of the brightest features in the image. Mid-sized cities such as Indianapolis, Indiana; Cincinnati, Ohio; and Louisville, Kentucky, also shine brightly, along with the interconnections between them along state and interstate highways.
Above the web of nighttime lights and Earth's lower atmosphere, a diffuse layer of green and orange is visible along the horizon on the left side of the photo. According to NASA, this band is airglow, produced when sunlight strikes atoms and molecules in the upper atmosphere and causes them to eject photons. To the right, light from the Sun arcs across the horizon, since sunrise was about an hour away on the East Coast and about two hours away in Chicago at the time of the exposure.
NASA noted that astronaut photos and other remote sensing observations of nighttime lights are scientifically valuable for tracking changes in the built environment. In the wide view, Chicago's lightscape appears as a homogeneous pale yellow, but detailed photographs reveal a range of colors that stem from different types of lighting.
Using NASA's Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth archive, researchers have developed a method for distinguishing lighting types within the pixels of nighttime photos. Systematically quantifying the brightness, color, and extent of urban lights can provide insight into how cities grow and evolve, the agency said.
Satellite sensors also observe changes in lighting. NASA's Black Marble nighttime lights product suite uses satellite observations to produce science-quality records of nighttime lights across the globe at daily, monthly, and yearly time scales. In the eastern United States, scientists have used these data to track power outages and restoration following major storms, lighting changes associated with new infrastructure, and transitions to LED lighting from older forms.
The main photograph, ISS075-E-226709, was acquired on October 18, 2026, with a Nikon Z9 digital camera using a 14-millimeter focal length. A second, more detailed image, ISS070-E-105097, was acquired on March 1, 2024, with a Nikon D5 digital camera using a 400-millimeter focal length. Both were provided by the ISS Crew Earth Observations Facility and the Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit at NASA's Johnson Space Center and were taken by members of the Expedition 75 and Expedition 70 crews, respectively. The images have been cropped and enhanced to improve contrast, and lens artifacts have been removed.
The International Space Station Program supports the laboratory as part of the ISS National Lab to help astronauts take pictures of Earth that will be of value to scientists and the public, and to make those images freely available online. Additional photographs taken by astronauts and cosmonauts can be viewed through the NASA/JSC Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth. The NASA Earth Observatory story was written by Lindsey Doermann.