Crater Lake, Oregon

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Crater Lake National Park in Oregon -- one of the nation's oldest national parks -- celebrated its centennial in 2002. When the U.S. Congress declared the area to be "dedicated and set apart forever as a public park or pleasure ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people of the United States" in 1902, it could not have imagined that the landscape would inspire photographers viewing Crater Lake from space.

Crater Lake, a volcanic caldera in south central Oregon's Cascade Mountains, boasts breathtaking scenery, created about 7,700 years ago with the volcanic eruption and subsequent collapse of the summit of Mount Mazama. Today, the crater, about 8 kilometers (5 miles) wide, contains the deepest lake in the United States; it is nearly 600 meters (1969 feet) deep. The main source of the water in the lake is the annual snowfall of over 1300 centimeters (512 inches). When this image was taken from the International Space Station on January 6, 2003, nearly 180 centimeters (71 inches) of snow covered the ground.

Astronaut photograph ISS006-E-15238 was provided by the Earth Sciences and Image Analysis Laboratory at Johnson Space Center. Additional images taken by astronauts and cosmonauts can be viewed at the NASA-JSC Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth.