"Terry Virts shares his astounding photos in this gallery of science, artistry, and our beautiful planet."

“..Far more satisfying is Terry Virts’ View From Above, which supplements magnificent images of Earth with stories drawn from the astronaut’s 213 days in space. He found photography to be a source of great pleasure in orbit, and it shows. Virts took a NASA record 319,275 photos during his six and a half months on the station, many looking down at Earth from the windowed cupola that his STS-130 shuttle crew attached to the station in 2010. He remembers specific places by their colors.

His anecdotes range from suspenseful—a false alarm about a potentially deadly ammonia gas leak has the space station crew briefly contemplating an emergency landing in Siberia—to charming (a room full of Japanese mission controllers singing “Jingle Bells” in Japanese to the crew). Virts’ account sparkles with life, even when the station itself often seems sterile and mechanical. Floating through the modules one day, he hears birds chirping, and finds cosmonaut Misha Kornienko listening to recordings of bird sounds sent up by Russian psychologists. Virts likes it so much he asks for his own Earth sounds, and plays them over all the station’s laptops, so “wherever I floated, it sounded like rain on the rooftop.” Moments like these separate View From Above from other coffee table space books that serve up lots of pretty Earth views, but leave out the humanity.”

“That moment of cosmic collegiality is just one of the stories recounted in Virts‘ dazzling new book…while things may be tense between Washington and the Kremlin, all such differences stop at the atmosphere’s edge”
“Virts’ book..is more than his stories; it’s also his pictures — dozens of vivid, often dizzying images not just of the Earth from space, but of the interior and exterior of the improbable skyliner that is the space station.. For most of us, space travel will always be done by proxy — something we experience only through the journeys of others. That’s been true since the very first time humans left the planet. Thanks to Virts, however, that second-hand experience feels more first-hand than it ever has before.”

“..It explains man’s relationship with space and universe. You will not be able to put this away on a shelf easily..”
The Washington Book Review“This majestic National Geographic photography book offers a spectacular view of Earth from outer space, featuring aerial imagery taken from the International Space Station by NASA astronaut Terry Virts. Few people get the experience of seeing the world from outer space — and no one has taken as many pictures of Earth from above as Terry Virts. Celebrated NASA astronaut, pilot of the space shuttle, crew member on Soyuz, and commander of the International Space Station, Virts has spent more than 200 days in space — and very few of those days went by without his reaching for his camera. Now as never before, Virts shares the astronaut’s view of the world, offering astounding aerial views of our planet and the vastness that surrounds it. The colors, shapes, details — and the stories they tell — are endlessly fascinating. Virts‘s book marries his stunning photographs with glimpses of everyday life in orbit. And amid this amazing show of Earth spectacles, he reflects on how the astronaut’s point of view has shaped his life and spirit. Filled with magnificent photographs that will astonish and inspire, this book — and its intrepid author — becomes our guide to a new way of looking at the world”

“ If, in fact, a picture is worth a thousand words, then astronaut Terry Virts has volumes to say about the view from space. So much so, that the 300 photographs that fill the pages of his new book represent less than one tenth of one percent of all the photos he took in space. And that was just from one of his two flights to the International Space Station. “My goal in ‘View from Above’ was to share the experience of spaceflight in book format as best as I could,” said Virts in an interview with collectSPACE. “It is most definitely not an ‘astronaut memoir,’ but neither is it simply a photography atlas of the Earth or space.” “I really wanted to capture what it is like to fly a space mission — from common events like launch and landing and spacewalking, but also what it was like to see Earth for the first time, or experience emergencies while in space, or learn how to float,”

“He’s as calm and brave and awestruck as any astronaut, and the stories he tells in the essays accompanying the photos mix humor, danger, and wonder.”

“For astronaut Terry Virts, it was the colors of the Earth from space that dazzled him. “I had never seen that shade of blue before,” he writes in the opening chapter of his new book.. Virts does more than describe colors in View From Above, his book about his experiences on the shuttle and the International Space Station.. Like many others who have flown in space, Virts writes that the spaceflight experience had changed him. “

“When it comes to landscape photography, astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) have the best seats in the house; when you’re 250 miles up and your window is full of Planet Earth, it’s impossible to resist. With almost 200 days and 84 million miles over 3,600 orbits of the planet, first as Flight Engineer then as Commander of the ISS in 2014/2015, NASA astronaut Terry Virts found time to photograph everything from sunrises and ice fields to hurricanes and lighting storms. ..Although framing images of specific places on Earth was always tempting, as well a challenging, Virts preferred to take more artistic shots that place Earth in its actual context – a planet floating alone in space. “A lot of astronauts like to zoom in on their house, or on cities at night, but my favourite were the 24mm wide-angle shots, where you can see the curvature of Earth and the blackness of space,” says Virts.”