NASA Astronaut captures breathtaking timelapse showing immense scale of Hurricane Milton

As Hurricane Milton races toward landfall in the Gulf of Florida, the government has urged residents to evacuate while there's still time. A breathtaking video from space captures the immense size and power of the hurricane. NASA astronaut Matthew Dominick (@dominickmatthew) shared a timelapse of the storm on X, filmed from the spacecraft’s window. His return to Earth has been delayed by the storm. “Timelapse flying by Hurricane Milton about 2 hours ago,” he wrote.

Dominick is aboard the SpaceX Crew Dragon Capsule Endeavour, currently docked at the International Space Station (ISS) for the Crew-8 mission. Endeavour arrived at the ISS in early March with NASA astronauts Michael Barratt and Jeanette Epps, and Alexander Grebenkin from Russia's space agency Roscosmos. Their return to Earth, originally scheduled for October 7, was postponed due to Hurricane Milton, which has made the splashdown site unsafe. They are now set to make their descent on October 13.

Milton is expected to make its landfall on Florida's Gulf Coast, near Tampa and St. Petersburg, between October 8 and October 9, and has the potential to be “one of the most destructive hurricanes on record for west-central Florida,” per NBC News.

In the short footage, Dominick captured the enormous size of the hurricane while peering through Endeavour’s window, beside which he sleeps and awaits the hurricane to loosen its stronghold over Earth’s waters.

When viewed closely, the footage also captures a portion of another spacecraft blocking the view of the Earth from Endeavour’s window. This spacecraft is Crew Dragon spacecraft Freedom and it is also docked to the ISS along with Endeavour. Freedom flew to ISS on September 29 for the Crew-9 mission, which is also supposed to bring back two NASA astronauts aboard Boeing Starliner whose eight-day mission stretched into a long eight-month mission.

On board "Freedom" are NASA astronauts Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov. Alongside them, two seats have been left empty for the return of Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore when the group returns to Earth in February 2025, per CNN. NASA chose the "Freedom" capsule to bring the stranded astronauts back home after their Starliner spacecraft started showing several helium leaks and thruster issues soon after arriving at the space station and hence was considered too risky to be considered for their return flight. Dominick’s timelapse footage tells the story of the entire scenario mixed up with the horrifying reality of Milton gushing toward the coast.

On X, Dominick’s video has attracted over 7 million views in less than 24 hours. People are expressing their disbelief at the leviathan size of Milton. “Hard to wrap your head around the sheer size and power of these storms,” commented @AjamesMccarthy. Others noted the enormous power of technology that has enabled the astronaut to share such an amazing perspective of nature. @gazza_jenks said, “Man, we live in the future. To have HD video from space so easily accessible on social media still breaks my brain. What a time to be alive.”