Washington

An astronaut aboard the International Space Station has clicked a stunning nighttime image of the border between India and Pakistan, showing one of the few places on Earth where an international boundary can be seen at night.

The astronaut took the nighttime panorama while looking north across Pakistan’s Indus River valley.

In the image, the winding border between Pakistan and India is lit by security lights that have a distinct orange tone.

The photo, released by NASA, shows port city of Karachi as a bright cluster of lights facing the Arabian Sea, which appears completely black.

City lights and the dark colour of dense agriculture closely track with the great curves of the Indus valley, NASA said.

The photograph shows one of the few places on Earth where an international boundary can be seen at night, NASA said.

The photograph was acquired on September 23, 2015, with a Nikon D4 digital camera using a 28 millimetre lens, and is provided by the ISS Crew Earth Observations Facility and the Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit, Johnson Space Center.

Another night image taken by an ISS astronaut in 2011 showed the India-Pakistan border zone looking southeast from the Himalaya.

PTI