Simply stunning!

it's a fake, you can see it here on snopes:

Pity about that, but it still looks fantastic, whatever the origin(s) of the image.

i agree, it's a pretty picture. but whenever i see something posted at plime that i've also seen at snopes i can't help but cringe a little. i just know that within a week my inbox will be full of emails featuring whatever it is and then i have to explain to my friend or family member that no, sorry, it's a fake. it's not all bad though, it was snopes.com that brought me to worth1000 (which is awesome) and that brought me to plime. :)

There are ways to tell that it's not authentic. First is that there's never, ever a time at which there are no clouds over that large an area. Second is that the bottom of the Atlantic ocean is visible, i.e., all the undersea mountains, continental shelves, the mid-Atlantic ridge, and so on. These geographical features are never visible, since they're always covered with lots of water. The presence of such topography is only known via sonar mapping. The image is synthetic.

On top of all that, the region visible in the image is that from an altitude of about 3,000 miles, whereas the space shuttle is incapable of heights of more than about 300 miles.

I'd have been perfectly happy with this described as "composite image of sunset over Europe" or some such.

It's impressive enough without the claim that it is a snapshot from an astronaut.