Astronaut photographs MLB stadiums as seen from space

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – @BednarChuck

NASA astronaut and Expedition 43 commander Terry Virts is an avid baseball fan, and with the 2015 Major League Baseball season kicking off this week, he has recently started taking pictures of MLB stadiums from space and sharing them as part of a social media game.

According to Space.com, Virts is capturing images of US cities that have baseball fields from the International Space Station (ISS) and posting them on his Twitter account along with the hashtag #ISSPlayBall. However, instead of identifying each picture, he’s making a game out of it.

In space, can you tell Fenway Park from Wrigley Field?

Virts started snapping photos of the 28 cities that host MLB teams during Spring Training last month, according to NASA, and he is asking his followers to look at the pictures and guess the cities. Sometimes he posts a group of different pictures and asks his followers to choose which one is the right city, and other times he will present it as a multiple choice question.

Virts, who said he grew up in Baltimore as a fan of the Orioles, is taking the pictures from the space station’s Cupola, an observatory module with a 31-inch window – the largest ever used in space, the agency said. He helped build the Cupola as a member of the space shuttle Endeavour crew in February 2010, during what was the US Air Force Colonel’s first-ever space flight.

Sharing his experiences in space through unique photos

The Expedition 43 commander said that he “started a lifelong love of baseball” and his beloved Orioles during the 1970s and 80s, and played the sport through high school. The new project lets him combine his love of the game with his passion for taking creative pictures while in orbit, and he said that he hopes that the game will give people a new perspective on their cities.

“This is my favorite thing to do in orbit,” Virts said in a statement. “I like to try to think of creative ways to take pictures, from a new perspective, or with new lighting. There is always something interesting looking out the window – if it’s lightning, an aurora, city lights at night, interesting geology on Earth, wide angle ‘big picture’ scenes of the Earth as a planet, the moon, planets or even stars- there is never a lack of good subject matter.”

“You just have to be prepared and able to use the camera very quickly and proficiently,” he added. “At the speed we travel a good picture is often fleeting and only available for a few seconds.  It’s also fun to take time-lapse sequences that we can turn into movies that brings the view a little more to life.  But as good as the camera is, it’s just not even close to the same thing as being here in person.”

—–

Follow redOrbit on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Instagram and Pinterest.

redOrbit.com
offers Science, Space, Technology, Health news, videos, images and
reference information. For the latest science news, space news,
technology news, health news visit redOrbit.com frequently. Learn
something new every day.”