Chris Hadfield (who I might add is a wonderful and inspiring lecturer- do see him speak if you can) took 45,000 photographs during 2,597 orbits of planet earth traveling at 17,500 miles per hour for five months in 2012-2013 on the International Space Station and he compiled some of these images into this book. This 200 page photo tour of our planet includes photos of Africa, Europe, Asia, Oceania, North America, and South America and is complete with Hadfield's insightful and often humorous observations about our planet.

This book is pretty awe inspiring. It is in many ways a simple yet profound observation of planet Earth. ( )

A quick photographic trip around the world. It was fun to pull up the sites in Bing Maps satellite view and see what they looked like in situ. ( )

Beautiful photo book from Chris Hadfield. I've heard him on a couple podcast episodes of Travel With Rick Steves and I love the way he talks about his experiences orbiting the earth and his reflections on the planet and mankind. The last time he was on the space station he took thousands of pictures and became intimately acquainted with earth's features from above. In this book he points out things that he learned or found interesting, but he also delves into whimsy by looking for shapes on the earth the same way we might look for shapes in the clouds. ( )

Great photos, but quite a few could be sharper/better reproduced. ( )

Astronaut Chris Hadfield serves up a selection of photographs of Earth that he took when he was on the International Space Station, and it's a book that is impossible to dislike and impossible to tire of. The perspective on Earth is unique and awe-inspiring and often surprising: many of Hadfield's pictures don't seem like Earth at all, their colours and compositions seeming like some alien world or abstract painting. Hadfield leans heavily into this abstract quality, and while it can't be said that the photos become samey – every one is remarkable – I found myself preferring astronaut Tim Peake's collection Hello, Is This Planet Earth?, which had greater variety and novelty in its selections. ( )