This book was a wonderful Christmas gift from my partner last year. I guess me raving on about how wonderful An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth for weeks on end sent her a subtle hint. And while I have been flipping through this wonderful book for a few months now, I have finally managed to sit down and read the text and walk through it from beginning to end.For those who do not know who Commander Chris Hadfield I feel a mixture of pity and resignation that you are a lost cause. You're probably not reading this review anyway. For the rest of us here is a picture to swoon over.Sorry couldn't resist.Anyway, in An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth Chris talks a bit about taking photographs of the Earth while on the ISS. This book is a collection of some of his best photos arranged by continent. There are cool little geography stories that go along with some of them and others are just pure eye candy.So of my favourites are Mount Etna, the Gulf of Aqaba, bushfires on the Nullarbor Plains, San Francisco Bay, the Panama Canal, and I think my favourite might be the photo of plane contrails over British Columbia. Here Chris communicated with the pilots of the Snowbirds, Canada's military acrobatic team to fly in unison to make a single contrail visible in space. It is amazing to think that he saw this form in real time also.One thing to keep in mind while reading this book is that it is not a copy of those glossy "Earth From Space" coffee table books. Those images are taken from satellite using very sophisticated equipment and probably have more work done on the image than a glossy magazine cover image. This is an amateur with an amateur camera in a brilliant location. He just took theses images in the few minutes he had between working on the ISS. So while these images cannot compete with those glossies with respect to the visual aesthetic factor, the value of theses images is in how they were taken, who they were taken by and also how they were collated and talked about. And that makes this book stand much taller than any glossy inhuman satellite photo book.