Meet the man who takes photos of golf courses from space

When youre cloistered 200 miles above Earth on the International Space Station, there are only so many ways to spend your downtime. Reading, exercising, tweeting William Shatner. During his four-month residency aboard the $150 billion satellite, Daniel Tani found a more creative hobby: photographing golf courses.

Ive got a fantastic picture of the Monterey Peninsula, Tani said the other day. You can make out all the holes at Cypress and at Pebble Beach.

Snapping courses from space isnt easy, and not just because of the absence of gravity or because of cloud interference far below. The space station, a bit longer than the length of a football field and with the living space of a six-bedroom house, orbits the earth at more than 17,000 miles per hour, or 280 miles per minute. That doesnt leave much set-up time.

I had about 10 seconds to find a course, frame it and photograph it, Tani says.

And photograph courses he did. Cape Kidnappers in New Zealand. Pinnacle Point in South Africa. Old Head and Ballybunion in Ireland...

And is that...yes, Bandon Dunes!

The two that Im kicking myself for not looking for were Augusta and Pine Valley, Tani says.

Epic space out.

This was back in late 2006 and early 2007 when Tani was on his second of two missions on the station. (His first came during an 11-day stint in 2001.) Its not unusual for spacemen and women to wile away the hours at the stations 360-degree bay window snapping photos of sunrises, swirling typhoons or Italy by night. But Tani appears to be the first astro-shooter to focus on golf courses.

When he was about 10 or 11, Daniel started beating golf balls around a field near his suburban Chicago home. By junior high, he had graduated to a par-3 course. But even through high school and his under- and postgrad days studying mechanical engineering at M.I.T., he never took the game too seriously. Then one of his older brothers moved to Scotland. On visits, Tani played some of the ancient links and his appreciation for the game grew. On side trips to Ireland, he pegged it around Dublin, through Kerry in the west, and up to Sligo in the north. He got washed out on his first visit to Old Head, on a stunning spit of land just south of Cork, but there was still plenty of sunshine that day: He met his future wife, Jane Egan, who was then the clubs business manager.

More:
Meet the man who takes photos of golf courses from space