This week, NASA astronaut Scott Kelly tweeted a picture of southern India that he took from the International Space Station. The photo, clicked from over the southwest Indian Ocean, shows a million glimmering lights over the peninsula projecting into a dark ocean and went viral within a few hours.

 

The photo also gave new fodder to conspiracy theorists and UFO hunters who noted a cylindrical object at the top right hand corner of the photo. Some took to social media to thank Kelly for what they believed was an unspoken message affirming the presence of extraterrestrial beings. Rational explanations – the “object” is a projecting part of the space station that made it into the frame, or an effect created by overexposure to light – didn’t convince them.

Kelly is one of two astronauts on a mission to spend a whole year in space and has now lived on board the space station for 238 days. He has become a social media sensation for sharing breathtaking photos of the world. His incredibly artistic photos of different topographies, man-made structures and atmospheric phenomena hashtagged EarthArt are widely shared.

Take a look at some of the most spectacular images – rip tides in Mozambique, industrialised regions of China and Aurora Borealis – in Kelly’s large visual catalogue of his #YearInSpace.