In the photo, the sea-green and deep purple lights of an Aurora Borealis burn above a yellow airglow in the northwest as a bright-blue dawn rises in the northeast, NASA said in a statement on its website.
One of the space station's solar panels can be seen on the left side of the photo. (See a high-resolution photo here.)
The space station was traveling at 28,163 kilometers per hour and located 160 kilometers northwest of Volgograd when the photo was taken at an altitude of 386 kilometers on March 28, NASA said.
The space agency did not say which of the six members of the Expedition 30 crew aboard the International Space Station took the photo. The crew includes U.S. commander Daniel Burbank; flight engineers Anton Shkaplerova, Anatoly Ivanishin, Oleg Kononenko of Russia; Andre Kuipers of the Netherlands; and Donald Pettit of the United States.
Last week, the crew boosted the space station by about four kilometers to a new altitude of 393 kilometers in preparation for the departure of three crew members on April 27 and the arrival of three new crew members in mid-May, Interfax reported.
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