According to Aristotle, in his famous opus The Poetics, “art imitates nature”.
But one might sometimes wonder whether it is not Oscar Wilde who is right when he says: “Life imitates art much more than art imitates life”.
Especially when you see the photos of the Earth’s surface taken from space.
Spaceman Thomas Pesquet took many of them during his mission more than 400 kilometres above the ground on board the International Space Station (ISS).
He is said to have taken hundreds of them and posted them on social networks with comments.
Here is a selection of 15 of his best photos, collected by Futura in a slideshow with a few words from the Frenchman.
They offer a glimpse of the beauty that can be found in the book Terre(s), which the ESA astronaut published with Éditions Michel Lafont: 320 pages of photos taken from the panoramic observation dome of the International Space Station.