The UK under a curtain of aurora

A Soyuz spacecraft carrying Britain’s Tim Peake, Russian cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko and NASA astronaut Tim Kopra, parachuted to the flat grasslands of Kazakhstan on Saturday, returning home from a six month mission to the International Space Station.

Scientists are using photographs taken by astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) to reliably measure the amount of light pollution worldwide and to produce a global colour map of the Earth at night. The total cost of the energy consumption for streetlights is estimated by the study to be 6300 million euros/year in the European Union.

Using a wide-angle lens, an astronaut aboard the International Space Station captured a dramatic near-cloudless view of north Africa and the Middle East.