AN astronaut has given the conflict in Israel some perspective by tweeting a picture showing explosions and rockets that even he can see from space.

Alexander Gerst, a German astronaut on-board the International Space Station, orbited over Gaza and Israel last night taking a photo and posting to Twitter after clear signs of explosions and the ongoing conflict could be seen below.

My saddest photo yet. From #ISS we can actually see explosions and rockets flying over #Gaza & #Israel pic.twitter.com/jNGWxHilSy — Alexander Gerst (@Astro_Alex) July 23, 2014

The image is a beautiful view marred by what’s going on. The populated areas are the bright clusters lit by street light and within those are intensely bright spots, which are explosions going off. In his tweet he also mentions being able to seeing rockets flying over but these are a bit harder to see on the dark image.

Gerst, who is also a geophysicist, volcanologist and explorer, regularly uploads spacey snaps to Twitter but his post calls this his ‘saddest photo yet’.

The image has struck a chord on Twitter with users retweeting the photo over 35,000 times and counting.

@Astro_Alex Alex, That's is the saddest thing ever, only if we could live peacefully but unfortunately that's the reality on our plant earth — Bina ;) (@iambinaxx) July 23, 2014

@Astro_Alex Not the fireworks you want to be seeing ........x — penny lillie (@flowerfly8) July 23, 2014

Gerst has posted some amazingly detailed pictures from his six month stay on the ISS including these incredible shots:

As a special type of Earth observation, sun glint pictures reveal an amazing amount of detail. #BlueDot pic.twitter.com/0zqOv6Utyv — Alexander Gerst (@Astro_Alex) July 17, 2014