June 2, 2003

June 2, 2003: Halfway between the Nile delta in the north and the Sudanese border in the south, the Nile River cuts a deep U-shaped bend into the Egyptian desert near Luxor. On Feb. 14, 2003, the International Space Station (ISS) flew over the Great Bend and science officer Don Pettit took its picture.

Justin Wilkinson, a Lockheed Martin earth scientist who works at the Johnson Space Center, describes the photo: "The dark river channel is bordered by green fields of the intensely farmed floodplain. The sharp margins of the agriculture generally mark a distinct break between the moist valley floor and the much drier slopes leading down from the surrounding high desert."

In Arabic these dry slopes are called wadis. Ranging in size from small gullies to wide valleys, wadis are carved from desert by infrequent--though often torrential--rains. From the ISS, they all look much alike, but one of them is special: the Valley of the Kings.

For about 500 years between 1500 and 1000 BC, Egyptians buried their pharaohs not in pyramids but in grand underground complexes. More than sixty royal tombs, including that of King Tutankhamen, are located in the Valley of the Kings across the river from Luxor. A close-up of the Valley extracted from one of Pettit's photos shows curious light markings--a telltale sign of modern archaeological excavation. (It also illustrates the stunning resolution of Earth pictures taken from the space station.)

The Valley lies on the west side of the Nile in the direction of the setting sun. That's no coincidence. In ancient times, sunset was associated with the afterlife. Come back tomorrow and we'll show you what the area looks like after sunset.

Today's image is a mosaic of three pictures (ISS006-E-27767, 27768 and 27770) taken by Don Pettit and stitched together by researchers at the Earth Sciences and Image Analysis Laboratory at the Johnson Space Center. Additional images taken by astronauts and cosmonauts may be viewed at the NASA-JSC Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth.