Soaring high above the Earth, Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano has snapped a photograph capturing a glowing Moscow and St. Petersburg at night.
Parmitano, who is on his first space flight aboard the international space station, posted the photo on his Twitter account late Thursday.
"Immense and unmistakable, Moscow and St. Petersburg fill the night with lights," he wrote in Italian.
Moscow resembles a sparkling spider web at the center of the photo, while St. Petersburg is a blaze of light at the top, left-hand corner.
Parmitano took the picture from 418 kilometers up aboard the space station, which is orbiting the Earth 16 times a day. Part of a six-member crew, he arrived on May 29 for a six-month stay as a representative of the European Space Agency.
The space station's crew has taken pictures of Russia before. Last year, an astronaut took a photo of Moscow from a vantage point high above Volgograd.
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