The artist is larger than his planet.

Of the dozen or so self-portraits that were taken in space, the one above, taken by Japanese ISS astronaut Aki Hoshide in September 2012, is by far my favourite — I particularly enjoy the concentric circles of lens, Earth and visor (alternating black and white) and the glamorous touch of the polka dots around the Sun’s glare.

Glam aside, note that you have never seen a picture where the artist takes more space than his planet of origin.

(To my knowledge, the first out-of-this-world self-portrait comes from the Moon, where Apollo 12 astronaut Charles Conrad captured his own reflection on colleague Alan Bean’s helmet — the lunar horizon in and out of his visor quite cleverly linked. This was in November 1969, just a few months after the first moon-landing.)