Space station astronaut captures stunning images of growing Hurricane Earl

To say the International Space Station offers a ‘bird’s eye view’ of the Earth would be an understatement. From its orbit 220 miles above the planet, astronauts can view the best - and worst - of Mother Nature including Category 4 Hurricane Earl as it bears down on the United States.

Hurricane Earl is now packing winds of 135 mph and is 200 miles north-northwest of San Juan, Puerto Rico. Mercifully, the damage from the storm’s close pass through the Caribbean was relatively minimal but Earl now has its sights set on the United States East Coast.

Astronaut Douglas Wheelcock is the commander of the Expedition 24 crew now on board the space station. The West Point graduate and Army colonel previously logged hundreds of hours aboard the Space Shuttle and is in the third month of a six-month stay commanding the ISS.

Like other recent visitors to the space station, Wheelcock is keeping the public up to date with the crew’s activities via Twitter. As the user ‘Astro_Wheels’, Wheelcock has used the messaging service to report on repairs to the station and ongoing experiments and now has posted extraordinary photos of Hurricane Earl.

The two images of the powerful hurricane span roughly 17 hours. The first, taken over the central Atlantic on Monday shows Earl when it was a Category 2 storm with loose, rotating bands. The second, taken this morning, shows how much more organized – and powerful – the storm has become.

The slideshow below contains the images taken by Colonel Wheelcock as well as images of previous hurricanes taken by International Space Station and Space Shuttle crews and NASA satellites.

* Related: High resolution satellite imagery shows Category 4 Hurricane Earl
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