Here’s a beautiful photo taken by a crew member aboard the International Space Station showing the crescent moon above Earth’s atmosphere, a hazy band of bright blue separating our world of life from the inhospitable harshness of space. An amazing shot, but what’s even cooler about it is that it looks remarkably like an illustration I’d made a couple of years ago of a similar scene…check it out on iStockphoto.com here. I basically made it just to see if I could get the gradients and colors in Illustrator to do…that…..and it’s uncanny how close it comes to what this Expedition 24 crew member captured on camera just a few days ago! So it’s kind of like life imitating art imitating life… 🙂

Check out more Earth/moon images on NASA’s Marshall Space Center Flickr set.

Image credit: NASA