Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, who has been aboard the International Space Station (ISS) since December last year, has captured stunning images of Earth, three weeks after capturing the Moon above “cloud cover”.

One of the photos, published on Hadfield’s Twitter Monday night (25), shows the Richat Structure, or “Eye of Africa”, which measures 50 km in diameter and was discovered in 1965 in Mauritania. The site is still considered an enigma for science and could be the result of a volcanic eruption about 100 million years ago, then sinking following a process of erosion.

Another image released Monday by Hadfield, who is a flight engineer, shows Mount Etna in Italy covered in snow and belching black smoke.

Mount Etna in Italy was seen from the ISS covered in snow and erupting (Photo: Chris Hadfield/NASA)

A third image taken by the Canadian astronaut is of a “raging” storm in formation.

A “furious” storm formation was also recorded by the ISS astronaut (Photo: Chris Hadfield/NASA)

On several occasions, Hadfield has posted a video in which teaches you how to cut your nails in zero gravity, and another in which he sings a song composed and recorded on the ISS especially for Christmas, entitled “Jewel in the night”. According to the astronaut, it was the first song created and performed in space.

Hadfield landed at the station on December 19, after blasting off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket.

Alongside him, American Tom Marshburn and Russian Roman Romanenko are part of the current expedition to the ISS. This Thursday (28), they are expected to be joined by Russian commander Pavel Vinogradov and flight engineers Chris Cassidy (American) and Alexander Misurkin (Russian), who will travel aboard the Soyuz TMA-08M rocket.