This photo of Hurricane Ivan was snapped as the International Space Station passed over the eye of the storm on Saturday, September 11, 2004, about 15 minutes after 23:00 GMT (7 p.m. EDT). At the time, Ivan was wobbling west off its predicted course, its eye just missing Jamaica. The storm was a powerful and dangerous Category 5 storm with sustained winds reaching to 270 kilometers per hour (165 mph) and higher gusts.
With tropical storm-force winds extending 280 kilometers from the eye, Ivan covers nearly the entire visible portion of the Earth in the above photo (22160). Portions of the ISS hardware (solar arrays) appear in the upper right corner.
The other images in this series show the eye of the storm (22187), a close-up of the eye (22167), and the entire hurricane from another angle (22192).
Astronaut photographs ISS009-E-22192 (taken with 17 mm lens); ISS009-E-22160 and ISS009-E-22187 (taken with 22 mm lens) and ISS009-E-22167 (taken with 180 mm lens) are provided by the Earth Observations Laboratory, Johnson Space Center.
The International Space Station Program supports the laboratory to help astronauts take pictures of Earth that will be of the greatest value to scientists and the public, and to make those images freely available on the Internet. Additional images taken by astronauts and cosmonauts can be viewed at the NASA/JSC Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth.
References & Resources
NASA images provided courtesy the Earth Observations Laboratory, Johnson Space Center.
