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A FRENCH astronaut who orbits Earth 16 times a day takes a photo of his favourite city from space every 24 hours and greets its residents on Twitter.
Thomas Pesquet has a special fondness for Madrid, since the Spanish capital was where he got his first job as an aerospace engineer.
At just 23 years old, he was employed at the headquarters of GMW – one of the key corporations in Europe's aerospace industry - in the commuter town of Tres Cantos, working as a space vessel dynamics engineer.
Although he often photographs his home country, Thomas tells followers on his social media sites that he feels a close connection with Madrid, and has often returned there to give conferences and talks on space in general and the research being conducted at the International Space Station (ISS), where he is based.
During his shifts on the ISS, Thomas developed the new hobby of taking pictures of cities from space in his breaks and off-duty periods.
This partly began because he was conscious that he was enjoying privileged views of his home planet which very, very few will ever get to see in person, and decided it was only fair to share them with his fellow earthlings.
He sees multiple sunrises and sunsets, storms, lightning and other weather phenomena from a different angle and in a much shorter time than the overwhelming majority of the human race – especially as he travels the full circumference of the globe 16 times in every 24 hours, or effectively, goes round the world every 90 minutes.
This means flying at a speed of 27,000 kilometres per hour (16,777mph).
Thomas' latest post on his Twitter site, @Thom_astro, featuring Spain's capital lit up from overhead (shown above), is captioned with a, ¡Buenas noches Madrid! ('Good evening, Madrid!') and reads, in French: “I love photographing this city, and the fact that I found my first job there means that's probably not so strange.”
On the same evening, Thomas posted photos of Venice, Italy and of Karkheh Dam in Iran.
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