International Space Station: 5 amazing views

The International Space Station may be the size of a football field, but its tiny silhouette looks almost ant-like as it crosses in front of the sun in an image released this week by NASA.

NASA's Image of the Day for Sept. 9 was a composite of five shots captured by Bill Ingalls, senior contract photographer for NASA Headquarters, on Sunday. Ingalls took the photos from Shenandoah National Park in Front Royal, Virginia. At the time, there were nine astronauts aboard the space station.

While the space station may seem small as it crosses in front of the featureless bright yellow circle, it looks almost lost against the craters of the moon in another dramatic image captured by Ingalls — NASA's Image of the Day on Aug. 5.

Both those images were skillfully captured from the ground.

There are far fewer people who have the opportunity to photograph the space station with the Earth as backdrop.

Existing images featuring the entire space station floating above the Earth were taken almost exclusively from NASA's space shuttles, which retired in 2011.

Now the space station's crew fly to and from the space station aboard Russian Soyuz spacecraft. Because it carries only three people (the space shuttles carried as many as eight), the crew are very busy during docking and undocking. Also, the windows are much smaller.

That makes picture-taking from the Soyuz almost impossible, NASA spokesman Kelly Humphreys told CBC News.

These days, most of the photos of Earth taken by astronauts include only part of the space station, visible in the corner as they look out the window.

View the photo gallery to see a variety of amazing views of the space station.