Introduction - You are Here: Around the World in 92 Minutes - page 2

Over time, my ability to understand what I was seeing improved. I started
to look forward to certain places and lighting conditions, in the way you love
to hear a favorite piece of music. I began to get Nature's sly jokes: rivers that
looked like letters of the alphabet, pieces of land that resembled animals. I
became more adept at noticing and interpreting the secrets Earth was dis-
creetly revealing.
My ability to photograph what I was seeing also improved. I started to fig-
ure out how to compose a shot in a way that draws attention to particular
features and textures. I didn't think of myself as the next Ansel Adams, but I
didn't want my pictures to look like satellite images, either. I wanted them to
have a human element, to express a point of view.
Like many astronauts, I felt compelled to try to communicate what I was
learning, so from orbit, I began posting photos on Twitter and other social
media sites. The immediacy of the reactions and interactions, the collective
sense of wonder, made me feel as connected to our planet and to other
people as I ever have, though I was floating 250 miles above Earth in the
company of just five other human beings.
Then I returned from space and started organizing my photos, and
promptly came across about a thousand that I wished I'd posted online. I
printed out a few to show my family, and was struck by how different they
looked on paper—so much sharper and more detailed—than they had on the
screen of my laptop. So I tried printing out some of the photos I had posted,
and quickly realized I was noticing entirely different things than I had when I
was back on the ISS, pressing the shutter. All of which explains the topic
you're holding in your hands. These are some of my favorite photos—the
majority are new, and all are newly framed with my reflections and explana-
tions.
Like many people, I want to understand our world better. Seeing it from a
different angle really helps, and no perspective is more radically different
than the one you get when you leave the planet altogether and look
back—whether literally, as I did, or through photographs. Those spectacular,
two-thousand-mile views make you a lot more aware of the big picture.
Every landscape, whether man-made or wholly natural, has a backstory.
Going to space forced me to figure some of them out—and doing that has
changed, irrevocably, the way I perceive the world. For instance, I have a
much deeper appreciation for the immensity of time. Today, driving down the
highway near my house, I pass a hill and register not just a hump of rocky
soil, but also the glacier that clawed and bumped it into existence thousands