This photo comes directly from The Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth, a government website operated by NASA at the Earth Sciences and Image Analysis department at Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center. They are responsible for training the astronauts in Earth observations, cataloging and archiving the photographs that astronauts take from space using hand held cameras and more. Here is the homepage, as you can see it has a .gov URL and is currently not up to date due to the fact that it’s a government website, and the government is currently shutdown. It’s very interesting that they would allow a photo like this one to be put up on the website.
Source: http://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/scripts/sseop/QuickView.pl?directory=ISD&ID=STS61C-31-2
Please keep in mind that a UFO stands for “Unidentified Flying Object.” I am not claiming that this particular UFO is extraterrestrial in origin. Dozens of NASA Astronauts have shared their opinion on UFOs. Dr Brian O’leary is one we’ve shared as well as Dr Edgar Mitchell. Just click on the highlighted names if you are interested in what they have to say. It would be fitting, since they have both been to space and are both former employees of NASA.
For those of you new to the UFO topic, here is a quick introduction done by historian and UFO researcher Richard Dolan. For more articles written by CE on the subject, you can visit our exopolitics section under our ‘alternative news’ tab.