I captured the Transit of Venus across the sun in 2012, which occurs once every 100 years, and was lucky enough to be on station when it happened.

Black and white self-portrait in the Cupola aboard the International Space Station. I was setting up a few cameras for nighttime timelapse imagery. I stretched a cloth across the hatch opening to eliminate stray light from Node 3 (the Cupola is attached to Node 3). There was a small opening just for my head so I could operate the cameras. I had the window shutters closed for this photo since it was daytime and the bright sunlight would spoil my desired lighting effect. If you can't tell, I went to great lengths for my craft. Over my missions I have captured hundreds of thousands of photos. This one was taken during Expedition-31 to the ISS, in 2012.

More orbital astrophotography can be found on my twitter and Instagram profiles, for those interested.

Earth viewed from space is beautiful, but no more so than Earth viewed from Earth; it is just new and different.

The star trails move due to the ISS pitch axis which makes one rotation every orbit. If you look left or right of your trajectory, stars go in circles; look forwards and stars go in straight lines.

Our laptop computers will periodically lock up due to cosmic rays; we call this Single Event Upsets ; SEU

Hurricanes are very impressive in scale

Chain lightning depicted as discrete flashes in a timelapse. Seen here is the history of an electrical storm, city lights streaking by on Earth, and star trails. The star trails form straight lines in the orbital forward direction but circular arcs left and right of your orbit. The atmosphere on edge is yellowish due to the soon to rise sun. Above that is the atmosphere f-region, glowing in the red from solar radiation on the residual atmospheric oxygen.

Taken during Expedition-31, Nikon D3s, 24mm f1.4 lens, ISO 800, 25 minute time lapse assembled from sequential 30 second exposures, 2012.

More orbital astrophotography can be found on my twitter and Instagram profiles.

I took this photo of sunset on orbit during Expedition-30 to the ISS using a fisheye lens. It takes 7 ½ seconds for the disk of the sun to slip below the horizon. It goes from bright daytime lighting to dark night lighting in about twice this time. There is no extended twilight on orbit. On Earth, it takes 2 minutes for the solar disk to set where our atmosphere, acting as a light buffer, gives extended twilight.

More astrophotography can be found on my Instagram and Twitter accounts.

Thanks for taking the time to answer; the physics behind the motion is different than what an Earth centric star trail would make you think.

Yes! The star arc slope changes as the star light passes through more dense atmos layers; i can talk about the visible natural phenomenology in a star trail photo for at least 30 minutes.

Normally there are 4 control moment gyros to hold station attitude, there was a failure so we were down to three and the control algorithm for this down mode was still being tweaked so some blips were expected

ISO 800 film was not flown to ISS for long duration missions due to cosmic ray fogging (remember, this was only the 6th mission to station). I asked the photo folks and they happily flew some for me.

The nasa photo chemistry person would develop one roll, check it for cosmic ray fogging/low contrast, change the chemistry, and do another. It took perhaps 8 rolls to get it down

We have Bogan arms that can clamp on fixtures near the window and steadily hold the camera in position

My first orbital star trail; taken during Expedition 6 in early 2003. I took this before we had low noise, nighttime-sensitive digital cameras. This photo was taken with a Nikon F5, 58mm noct-Nikkor f1.2 lens with Fujichrome ISO 800 film and a 65 second exposure. All the detail seen in my later digital star trails can be seen; atmospheric airglow appearing as a green key lime pie layer, the fainter upper atmospheric red f-region, cities streaking by from orbital motion, lightning storms flashing as a function of time, and star trails. The blips in the star trail arcs were caused by the ISS attitude shifting around due to a down mode failure of our control moment gyros. For high speed film, it would become fogged by cosmic rays after about a month and was typically flown only on short two week Space Shuttle missions.

I got special permission to fly this film, launching with us on STS 113 in November 2002 and was supposed to return on STS 114 in February. Due to the STS 107 Columbia disaster, STS 114 was delayed for 2½ years. I returned about 70 rolls of film on our Soyuz TMA-1 in May 2003. Working with the photochemistry engineers at NASA JSC, we developed one roll at a time to find the best development process that minimized the effects of cosmic ray damage. This photo is the result from that effort.

More star trails from space can be found on my Instagram and Twitter accounts.