August 31, 2020
The Persian Gulf forms the center of this photo taken by an astronaut from the International Space Station (ISS). The nighttime lights mark the bigger cities and highways of Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. The brightest lights are focused along the southern and western shorelines, where the significant cities of Kuwait City, Doha, Abu Dhabi, and Dubai stick out. Several smaller sized port cities line the northern coast at the foot of the Zagros Mountains.
The lights speckled throughout the dark waters of the Gulf suggest ships going through among the world’s significant trade paths. The narrowest area is the Strait of Hormuz, which links the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Oman. The Strait differs in width in between 39 and 96 kilometers (21 to 90 nautical miles) and represents an essential chokepoint in the worldwide trade network that funnels countless barrels of petroleum and petroleum items daily through the area.
This photo offers an exceptional example of the broad field of vision that team members have from their perch on the ISS. Tehran, the capital of Iran, shows up near the Earth limb and stands around 1200 kilometers (750 miles) from Dubai.
Astronaut photo ISS063-E-81262 was gotten on August 31, 2020, with a Nikon D5 digital electronic camera utilizing a 28 millimeter lens and is offered by the ISS Crew Earth Observations Facility and the Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit, Johnson Space Center. The image was taken by a member of the Expedition 63 team. The image has actually been cropped and boosted to enhance contrast, and lens artifacts have actually been gotten rid of. The International Space Station Program supports the lab as part of the ISS National Lab to assist astronauts take images of Earth that will be of the best worth to researchers and the general public, and to make those images easily readily available on the Internet. Additional images taken by astronauts and cosmonauts can be seen at the NASA/JSC Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth. Caption by Laura Phoebus, Jacobs, JETS Contract at NASA-JSC.
