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For nearly 60 years, astronauts have been looking down at Earth from space.

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And all along, they have been shooting photos.

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They have been doing so almost daily since November 2000, when the International Space Station became a permanent home to astronauts.

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We're over 3 million images in the archive.

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It is perhaps the longest continuous remote sensing record that we have for the Earth's surface.

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Like everything the astronauts do, they are trained for this job -- to look at our planet and chronicle what they see.

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They don't look at Earth and take photos just for the novelty, though there is definitely beauty, joy, and inspiration in it.

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So it's not just for fun and make them feel comfortable. There's real use to it.

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Space can be disorienting. So the astronauts are trained to orient themselves to their planet as they float above it.

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In their first days in orbit, very little of what they see looks familiar.

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Knowing how to look at Earth can help them connect to home.

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Most people don’t have a mental geography of any other place.

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I think it makes the world more manageable mentally so that they don't feel as though it's just overwhelmingly big.

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Crews really like looking at the Earth.

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There have been studies done in the past that it provides an actual psychological benefit for them, to be tied back to their home planet.

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An astronaut with a camera is also useful to science and society.

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He or she can pick out features of Earth or observe natural events and snap images that have real societal value.

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If the astronaut has any training at all, they recognize things that are out of the ordinary,

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and then they shoot it.

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Some events are caught by chance. Others are shot at the request of federal and international agencies.

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Folks on the ground would help me, when they knew, for example, weather or other events were taking place in the world,

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they would help me by giving me those targets.

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Say there's a storm here, or there's a fire there, or there's a volcano eruption over here.

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In August 2017, Tropical Storm Harvey rapidly intensified into a category four hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico.

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It sat for days off the coast of Texas and dumped record amounts of rain, leading to devastating floods.

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With hurricane Harvey, we were able to document just the huge amounts of sediment outflow that came from that storm.

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Once the imagery is geo-referenced, then you can actually do measurements of what the extent of that sediment plume is.

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We try to impress upon that on the crews during their training too, that we're not just asking you to take pictures.

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This is actual science data that people are looking for, and we're supporting external science requests to get this data.

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It's a fundamentally different dataset than most polar orbiting satellites collect.

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An astronaut can view a place from different angles,

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different fields of view,

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different times of day,

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and different lighting conditions.

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They make real-time decisions about the best way to view events and places on Earth.

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The astronaut is doing the choosing ahead of the taking of the data, which is the exact opposite of what the satellites do.

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So you don't need to take nearly so many. You take a fraction of 1% of the images and you still see very interesting stuff.

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Of particular interest to scientists is how Earth changes over time.

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Since we've got over 50 years of manned space flight photography of Earth,

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you can look at certain areas and get a timeline of what's changed over time.

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like glaciers receding or growing.

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Or this is Lake Eyre and I've never seen it with water before. Here it's got water in it, bang, take the shot.

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The photos also spur new discoveries.

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Scientists have used astronaut photographs to better understand lightning and auroras.

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They have observed unusual atmospheric phenomena like sprites and polar mesospheric clouds.

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They have studied how city lights affect animal behavior.

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And they have discovered inland deltas and river deposits called megafans.

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Even in 1988, we thought we knew the dry surfaces of the planet.

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We didn't, at a mesoscale, at that that middling scale.

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This photography specifically gave me a worldview which I hadn't had before.

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And that was key to seeing that there are megafans around the planet.

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Beyond their value to science, the photos shot by astronauts remind us of the beauty and wonder of our planet.

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It's really a bottomless vault of riches that anybody now in the world can go and search through that vault and tap into those riches and do so much with it.

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There is also a somewhat more aesthetic component.

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Astronaut photographs of the Earth, they can look almost identical to an image you might take out of an airplane.

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Because of that, the data is immediately accessible to people.

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Astronaut photography is unique in that it's not just like a nadir-looking satellite image.

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It is a photo that someone picked up a camera and chose to take.

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Having that perspective of looking at Earth's horizon and seeing these really wide landscapes where you can literally view different climate zones all within a photo,

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I think puts into perspective how connected our world is.

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I think through capturing the imagery of all the different things on the surface of the Earth, all the phenomena that you can see from the vantage point,

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I think it just grew over time my appreciation for the uniqueness of Earth, for the resources that we find here, for what we've been able to do.

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It elevates a sense of responsibility to steward those things, to care about them a little bit more, to appreciate them.