Astronaut tweets photos -- from space

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Twitter is home to interesting people. But in recent days, no other user has been more interesting than Soichi Noguchi, a Japanese astronaut who has been tweeting photos of Earth from the International Space Station. For almost two weeks, Soichi has used TwitPic, a service that allows users to upload images and alert Twitter followers to those pictures, to show off his views from space.

The Japanese astronaut first started tweeting images of Haiti after last month’s horrific earthquake left hundreds of thousands of people dead or injured.

‘Flew over Port Au Prince of Haiti this afternoon,’ Noguchi wrote as a caption to his Haiti image, taken on Jan. 24, more than a week after the Jan. 12 earthquake. ‘Our thoughts and prayers to Haiti people, from ISS.’

Since then, the astronaut has taken time to tweet several stunning photos, including city lights in Tokyo, the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, and breathtaking views of Maldives Island in the Indian Ocean.

Noguchi joins a growing list of astronauts who have tweeted from space, including Mike Massimino, who gained notoriety (and more than 1 million Twitter followers) last May after becoming the first astronaut to tweet from space.

Since then, NASA has created a Twitter profile where the social network’s users can see what U.S. astronauts are tweeting from space.

-- Don Reisinger