Go Spaceborne with Astronaut Don Pettit

Go Spaceborne with Astronaut Don Pettit

For many people, science is intimidating. But there’s something about space that has always captured the public’s imagination, and photography has been central in building inspiration for everyone from writers to scientists. Photos from the Apollo moon landings to the stellar images captured by the Hubble Telescope have captured by wonderment of celestial objects, but astronauts on the International Space Station have been pointing their cameras towards Earth and creating a whole new corpus of astonishing images.

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Several years ago, PhotoShelter inaugurated our annual series of photo-related talks called Luminance. We had the crazy idea to invite astronaut Don Pettit to give a talk by writing an email to NASA. We didn’t hold out much hope, but a few weeks later, Don accepted. The other speakers were no slouches, but suffice it to say, everyone was pretty thrilled to meet a real life astronaut (only 536 people have been in space). 

Although Pettit is a chemical engineer by training, he’s had a long fascination with photography. During one of his stints aboard the ISS, he cobbled together some spare parts to build a barn door tracker and started taking incredible star trail images. It wasn’t long before those images started appearing everywhere – enthusiasts even went so far as to build a movie from his stills. It would be no exaggeration to say that Pettit’s photography has helped build renewed interest in space.

Thus we’re pretty happy to announce the release of Spaceborne, a book of Pettit’s images published by our friends at PSG. It’s going to make a great holiday gift for my dad (but don’t tell him that).

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This article was written by

Allen Murabayashi is the co-founder of PhotoShelter.

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