Interview: Inside Astronaut Don Pettit's Jaw-Dropping Space Photography

NASA astronaut Don Pettit has flown in space three times, two of them long-duration stays on the International Space Station, and he made the most of his extended time in space capturing hundreds of thousands of photographs of what astronauts see from space — beautiful photos of Earth's cities at night and airglow, the circling of star trails in space over time and the station itself. The best of Pettit's photographs are collected in a new coffee-table book, "Spaceborne" (Press Syndication Group, 2016), which vividly spotlights the extraordinary sites visible from an orbital perspective. Space.com talked with Pettit about the very first photo he took, rigging up a device to capture nighttime cities from space and the strange Earth phenomena one can only see from above.