Pictures in Space, featuring NASA Astronaut Donald Pettit

Above Photograph © Donald Pettit, NASA

At its best, photography draws from both science and art, to give resulting images a dual purpose—aesthetic innovation and scientific merit. And when that photography happens from the windows of the International Space Station, capturing star trails, city lights, and our blue planet against the void of space, it becomes something truly transcendent.

In today's show, we're privileged to chat with NASA Astronaut Donald Pettit, a scientist, inventor, and photographer who has spent nearly two years living, working, and making pictures in orbit.

Some fun take aways from our chat include:

How photographing in a microgravity environment can turn a traditional group portrait      into bodies scattering like bowling pins when the photographer tries to join the shot.

The vast perspective when viewing out a window of the ISS—on the order of half a continent—rather than a 50-to-100-kilometer horizon on earth.

The stratospheric volume of imagery captured during a mission, and the discerning Lightroom workflow Don uses to retrieve individual photos from his archive at home.

The importance of a humble synch cord to connect two cameras and render the "many decades of brightness" on an EV scale as a single HDR image to illustrate the rapid transition from day to night that occurs in orbit.

And, finally, how Don has taken the concept of synchronized imagery to a cosmic level by pairing the same phenomena he captures from orbit with a complementary view recorded from earth, in collaboration with astrophotographer Babak Tafreshi.

As Don explains towards the end of our chat, "I'm a big proponent of the concept of a frontier. My frontier happens to be space, but there are frontiers all around us."

He then shares this parting advice: "So just explore the frontiers that present themselves to you, the frontiers that you're motivated to go to. And just open your eyes and collect data, and then record or write about it, because you could make an observation and if you don't somehow share that with others through publications or imagery, it's almost as if it's never been done."

Guest: NASA Astronaut Donald Pettit