An out of this world view: Astronaut looks down at Earth from window of her space station




Tracy Caldwell Dyson realises there's no place like home as she peers down at Earth from the highest vantage point possible - space.



Staring out of the windows of the International Space Station (ISS), the astronaut takes in the planet in all its wonderful glory.



Orbiting our planet about 217 miles up, the ISS is high enough so that the Earth's horizon appears clearly curved.

Homesick: Astronaut Tracy Caldwell Dyson peers down at Earth from her vantage point of around 350 kilometres above our planet A night-time photograph made by a crew member on the International Space Station Expedition shows a view of Sicily and the 'boot' of Italy

Tracy Caldwell Dyson

Astronaut Dyson's windows show some of Earth's complex clouds, in white, and life-giving atmosphere and oceans, in blue.

The space station orbits the Earth about once every 90 minutes and it is not difficult for people living below to spot it in the sky if they look carefully.

The ISS can frequently be seen as a bright point of light drifting overhead just after sunset.



In fact, telescopes can even resolve the overall structure of the space station.



The above image was taken in late September from the ISS's Cupola window bay.

Meanwhile, back on ISS, two Russian cosmonauts exited the station for a spacewalk to install equipment and perform maintenance.

Video broadcast from Russian mission control outside Moscow showed Fyodor Yurchikhin and Oleg Skripochka carefully making their way out of a hatch for a spacewalk.

Their main task was to install a workstation on the space lab's Zvezda service module for use by Russian and European space flyers.



Yurchikhin and Skripochka were unable to complete one of the tasks, the relocation of a camera from one side of the Rassvet module to another. The camera would not sit properly on its new mounting, Yurchikhin said in video broadcast from Russian mission control outside Moscow.



Four of the station's crew remain inside: Russian Alexander Kaleri and American astronauts Douglas Wheelock, Shannon Walker and Scott Kelly.

This dazzling image shows the bright lights of Cairo and Alexandria, Egypt, on the Mediterranean coast as well as the Nile River