The Nardò Ring is a striking visual feature from space, and astronauts have photographed it several times. The Ring is a race car test track; it is 12.5 kilometers long and steeply banked to reduce the amount of active steering needed by drivers. Although it is a perfect circle, it appears oval in this photograph. This distortion is because the astronaut’s viewing angle was 35 degrees, looking back along the orbit track to the southwest from the International Space Station’s window.
The Terra satellite captured a rainbow-like optical phenomenon called a glory over the Pacific Ocean. Water droplets within clouds scatter light to produce the effect.
The setting sun highlights cloud patterns—as well as the Pacific Ocean surface itself—in this photograph taken by an astronaut on the International Space Station.
In this image, the swirling clouds known as vortex streets appear along the left edge of the image, stretching southward from Isla Guadalupe. Southeast of the vortex street, a glory, which resembles a rainbow, hovers above the cloud cover. The glory is faint but large, 200 to 300 kilometers long, along a north-south orientation.