Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield finished out his five-month flurry of songs, snapshots and social media from outer space with a real doozy: a rendition of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” that even Bowie is retweeting.

The music video was months in the making: With Bowie's approval, the song's lyrics were tweaked to reflect Hadfield's return from the International Space Station on Monday aboard a Russian Soyuz craft. "Lock your Soyuz hatch and put your helmet on," Hadfield sings in the video. After showing scenes of Hadfield strumming on his guitar and gazing soulfully out the station's windows, the video winds up with a Soyuz parachuting down to its landing.

Since "Space Oddity" went up on Sunday, it's been viewed on YouTube more than 2.7 million times.

The YouTube hit caps off an orbital tour of duty during which Hadfield sent down thousands of pictures via his Twitter account, performed the first original song recorded on the space station, mixed it up with "Star Trek" icon William Shatner and unveiled Canada's new $5 bill. For the past two months, he was doing all this while serving as the station's first Canadian commander.

"He's brought space back, not just for Canadians but for the world," fellow Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen told NBC News.

Dreams of space
Hadfield, 53, began his path to stardom during his childhood on a corn farm in southern Ontario. Watching Neil Armstrong's first steps on the moon in 1969 inspired him to dream of becoming an astronaut when he was 9 years old. He started flying airplanes in his teens, and went on to become a fighter pilot in the Canadian Armed Forces. He's been an astronaut since 1992, and he flew on space shuttle missions in 1995 and 2001.

Last December, he finally got his shot at a long-term stint in space — and he definitely made the most of the experience.

Slideshow: The antics and artistry of astronaut Chris Hadfield

Canadian spaceflier Chris Hadfield has posted incredible pictures of the world from space. He has also explained how to brush your teeth, shave and clip your nails while weightless.

Launch slideshow

Hadfield's 28-year-old son, Evan, told NBC News that his father put in several hours a day snapping pictures and sending tweets, in addition to his usual 10-hour work shift aboard the station. "When he wasn't working directly for space station maintenance, or on one of his science experiments, he was doing something with his time to benefit people down here," Evan Hadfield said.

Evan worked long hours, too, without pay. Over the past five months, he has been managing his father's social-media accounts and taking the lead in getting videos like "Space Oddity" produced. "I work about 16 hours a day, seven days a week," he said. "Last week I worked 19 hours a day. ... I read about 13,000 to 17,000 messages a day, and that's just in the morning."

"Space Oddity" was a special case, in part due to a tangle of international copyright issues. The Hadfields started working with Bowie and his team, as well as NASA and the Canadian Space Agency, even before the astronaut's launch in December. "It was definitely something we wanted to do," Evan said.

Why do it? Chris Hadfield hinted at the reasons in a different farewell-to-space video: "Who'd have thought that five months away from the planet would make you feel closer to people?" he asked. "Not closer because I miss them — just closer because seeing this [experience] this way and being able to share it through all the media that we've used has allowed me to get a direct reflection back immediately from so many people. ... It makes me feel like I'm actually with people more, that we're having a conversation. That this experience is not individual, but it's shared and it's worldwide."

Hansen said all of Hadfield's pictures, videos and tweets could be boiled down to a simple message: "We do live on a spaceship, a spaceship called Earth, and we need to work together to protect it."

The next chapter
So what's next? After Hadfield and his two Soyuz crewmates touch down in Kazakhstan, they'll be whisked away in separate directions: Russian cosmonaut Roman Romanenko will head toward Moscow, while Hadfield and NASA astronaut Tom Marshburn will be flown directly back to NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston for medical checks, debriefings, rest and recuperation.

"We have a lot in store for these guys over a number of weeks," Hansen said. And that's not counting a single tweet.

It's hard to believe that Hadfield will be out of the social-media spotlight for long. "We've still got a lot of stuff," Evan Hadfield said. There are still lots of photos and videos from his father's spaceflight that have yet to be shared. But not even the Hadfields know how all those visions from outer space will come out, and on what timetable.

"I don't know, and I don't even want to speculate, because what if I'm wrong?" Evan said. "I hope, I really hope that people take Dad's message to heart and continue it past his return."

Update for 12:25 p.m. ET May 14: The "Space Oddity" video viewership is up to nearly the 7 million mark, and Hadfield commented on the YouTube phenomenon shortly after his landing in Kazakhstan. "I'm very happy that ... 7 million are interested. It is very interesting and historic to be in space," Reuters quoted Hadfield as saying.

"It's part of humanity to be in space," Hadfield said in Russian. "What we were feeling, what we were doing there, the music we played, this is a big part of our lives." 

More about Chris Hadfield:

• Astronaut's artistry hits warp speed
• How Canada's top astronaut sees the world
• Cosmic Log archive on Chris Hadfield

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

This story was originally published on Mon May 13, 2013 7:49 PM EDT

Canada's new printed-polymer $5 bill has received the country's highest sendoff, altitude-wise, from International Space Station commander Chris Hadfield. Tuesday's currency-unveiling ceremony in space was just the latest in a series of achievements that have drawn attention to Canada's best-known spaceflier.

Hadfield already has made his mark as a photographer, a musician and composer, and an explainer of outer-space phenomena ranging from crying to vomiting in zero-G. There's a reason why the Bank of Canada turned to him to introduce one of the last currency notes to be converted to counterfeit-resistant polymer: One side of the $5 bill celebrates Canada's contributions to space exploration, including the space station's Canadarm2 and DEXTRE robot.

"I just want to tell you how proud I am to be able to see Canada's achievements in space highlighted on our money," Hadfield told Canadian officials via a space-to-Earth video link. Hadfield said the pictures played to Canada's strength in space robotics.

As Hadfield spoke, he plucked a bill from the wall of the station's Destiny laboratory and set it spinning in zero gravity in front of the camera. The other side of the bill has a less spacey theme: It features a portrait of Sir Wilfrid Laurier, who was Canada's prime minister from 1896 to 1911.

Bank of Canada spokeswoman Julie Girard said the outer-space ceremony was "quite a few months in the making." The polymer note was flown up to the space station with Hadfield back in December, and held in reserve for Tuesday's ceremony. "We wanted to be the first to unveil a bank note in space," she told NBC News.

Bank of Canada

This rendition of the Canadian $5 bill shows Canadarm2 and DEXTRE in more detail. The bank note is to be issued in November.

Canada's new $10 note, which commemorates the country's rail system, was unveiled at the same time in Ottawa. The $5 and $10 bills will complete Canada's conversion to polymer-based currency, tricked up with transparent areas and hologram markings to make them harder to counterfeit. The Bank of Canada says these notes should last two to three times longer than the country's cotton-based paper bank notes — and when they wear out, they can be traded in and recycled.

The new notes won't be rolled out to the Canadian public until November. That'll provide enough lead time for training clerks and law enforcement officials to get familiar with the bills. Hadfield will be back on Earth long before November: He's due to get on board the next Soyuz capsule leaving the station on May 14, alongside NASA's Tom Marshburn and Russia's Roman Romanenko.

So what happens to Hadfield's $5 bill? Girard said the astronaut will bring the note down with him, and it will eventually be put on exhibit at the Bank of Canada's currency museum.

Several of Hadfield's priceless photographs of Earth from space are already on exhibit in our latest Month in Space Pictures slideshow. Check out the pictures, plus this bonus 3-D picture of Mars from NASA's Curiosity rover. The 3-D photo was featured in our "Where in the Cosmos" contest on Facebook. Cosmic Log fan Ryan Meader was the first to report that the mountain featured in the picture is referred to as Mount Sharp (by Curiosity's science team) and Aeolis Mons (by the International Astronomical Union).

Meader says he's a long-time reader: "I think it's fair to say that I'm on the hard-core passionate end of the spectrum — so it was to my great delight that I got the jump on this little contest," he wrote.

We're delighted to send Meader a free pair of red-blue 3-D glasses, compliments of Microsoft Research's WorldWide Telescope project — and we'll have a few more spectacles to give away in the weeks to come. So click on the "like" button for the Cosmic Log Facebook page and get ready for the next "Where in the Cosmos" contest.

Slideshow: Month in Space: April 2013

Chris Hadfield / CSA

Feast your eyes on an alligator-like mountain range and other curiosities seen from outer space in April 2013.

Launch slideshow

NASA / JPL-Caltech

A stereo image from NASA's Mars Curiosity rover shows the terrain between the robot and Mount Sharp (a.k.a. Aeolis Mons) inside Gale Crater. Wear red-blue glasses to get the 3-D effect, and don't dwell too much on the hardware in the foreground. Trying to focus in on that part of the picture can make you go cross-eyed.

More about Canada's best-known spaceflier:

• Chris Hadfield's tribute to Boston bomb victims
• What happens to a washcloth in space?
• NBC News archive on Chris Hadfield

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with NBCNews.com's stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield took the helm of the International Space Station on Wednesday, marking only the second time in the outpost's 12-year history that command has been turned over to someone who is not American or Russian.

"It's a huge honor and a privilege for me, but also for all the people at the Canadian Space Agency and for my entire country," Hadfield, 53, said during a change-of-command ceremony broadcast on NASA TV.

"Thank you very much for giving me the keys to the family car," Hadfield told outgoing station commander Kevin Ford, a NASA astronaut who is due to depart on Thursday along with Russian cosmonauts Oleg Novitskiy and Evgeny Tarelkin. "We're going to put some miles on it, but we'll bring it back in good shape."

Ford, Novitskiy and Tarelkin have been orbiting 250 miles (400 kilometers) above Earth on the station since October.

Command of the station, a project of 15 nations that has been permanently staffed since November 2000, normally rotates between the two primary partners, United States and Russia. But in May 2009, Belgian astronaut Frank De Winne became the first station commander from the European Space Agency.

Hadfield, a veteran of two space shuttle missions, is the station's first Canadian commander. He will be part of a three-man skeleton crew until NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy and Russian cosmonauts Pavel Vinogradov and Alexander Misurkin arrive later this month.

NASA

Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield juggles tomatoes in zero gravity aboard the International Space Station after unpacking a SpaceX cargo capsule. Hadfield now serves as the station's first Canadian commander.

Hadfield, astronaut Thomas Marshburn and cosmonaut Roman Romanenko have been aboard the station since Dec. 21. They are due to return to Earth on May 13.

Among Hadfield's first duties as commander is overseeing the packing and release of the visiting SpaceX Dragon cargo capsule. The capsule, making a second resupply run for NASA, is due to depart the station on March 25.

Hadfield has taken to Twitter to share his experiences in orbit, firing off short messages and pictures several times a day. His followers now number more than 512,000.

"My heartfelt congratulations to Commander Hadfield and his family on what is an important milestone for all Canadians," the country's industry minister, Christian Paradis, said in a statement.

More about Chris Hadfield:

• Astronaut and musician perform space duet
• Canadian spaceflier's artistry hits warp speed
• William Shatner calls fellow Canadian in space

Copyright Thomson Reuters 2013. Check for restrictions at: http://about.reuters.com/fulllegal.asp

Marco Ugarte / AP file

A monarch butterfly sits on a tree trunk at the Sierra Chincua Sanctuary in Mexico.

MEXICO CITY —The amount of Monarch butterflies wintering in Mexico dropped 59 percent this year, falling to the lowest level since comparable record-keeping began 20 years ago, scientists reported Wednesday.

It was the third straight year of declines for the orange-and-black butterflies that migrate from the United States and Canada to spend the winter in mountaintop fir forests in central Mexico. Six of the last seven years have shown drops, and there are now only one-fifteenth as many butterflies as there were in 1997.

The decline now marks a statistical long-term trend and can no longer be seen as a combination of yearly or seasonal events, the experts said.

But they differed on the possible causes.

Who's at fault?
Illegal logging in the reserve established in the Monarch wintering grounds was long thought to contribute, but such logging has been vastly reduced by increased protection, enforcement and alternative development programs in Mexico.

The World Wildlife Fund, one of the groups that sponsored the butterfly census, blamed climate conditions and agricultural practices, especially the use of pesticides that kill off the Monarchs' main food source, milkweed. The butterflies breed and live in the north in the summer, and migrate to Mexico in the winter.

"The decrease of Monarch butterflies ... probably is due to the negative effects of reduction in milkweed and extreme variation in the United States and Canada," the fund and its partner organizations said in a statement.

Omar Vidal, the World Wildlife Fund director in Mexico, said: "The conservation of the Monarch butterfly is a shared responsibility between Mexico, the United States and Canada. By protecting the reserves and having practically eliminated large-scale illegal logging, Mexico has done its part.

"It is now necessary for the United States and Canada to do their part and protect the butterflies' habitat in their territories," Vidal said.

Debate over logging
Logging was once considered the main threat to the reserve, located west of Mexico City. At its peak in 2005, logging devastated as many as 1,140 acres (461 hectares) annually in the reserve, which covers 193,000 acres (56,259-hectares). But a 2012 aerial survey showed almost no detectable logging, the first time that logging had not been found in detectable amounts since the mountaintop forests were declared a nature reserve in 2000.

Lincoln Brower, a leading entomologist at Sweet Briar College in Virginia, said in a statement that "the report of the dwindling Monarch butterfly winter residence in Mexico is ominous."

"This is not just the lowest population recorded in the 20 years for which we have records," Brower said. "It is the continuation of a statistically significant decrease in the Monarch population that began at least a decade ago."

However, Brower differed on whether small-scale logging, the diversion of water resources and other disruptive activity in the reserves in Mexico are playing a role in the decline.

"To blame the low numbers of monarchs solely on what is happening north of Mexico is misleading," Brower said. "Herbiciding of soybean and corn fields that kills milkweed is a serious problem, but the historical decline over the past 19 years has multiple causes.

"All three countries need to face up to the fact that it is our collective activities that are killing the migratory phenomenon of the Monarch butterfly," he said.

Hidden problems
Environmentalist and writer Homero Aridjis praised Mexico for progress in reducing illegal logging, but added that "low intensity logging, not detected in satellite image analysis, continues unabated in and near critical overwintering habitats."

The head of Mexico's nature reserves, Luis Fueyo, said there are still some problem to be solved at the wintering grounds in Mexico, including some small-scale logging and water availability. The Monarchs don't drink any water throughout their long migration until the reach Mexico, and the mountain streams in the area have been affected by drought and human use.

The migration is an inherited trait. No butterfly lives to make the round trip. The millions of Monarchs cluster so densely on tree boughs in the reserve that researchers don't count their individual numbers but rather measure the amount of forest they cover.

This winter, the butterflies covered just 2.93 acres (1.19 hectares), down from 7.14 acres (2.89 hectares) last year.

Copyright 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. 

Sean Kilpatrick via Reuters

Lowell Glacier rises from waters in Kluane National Park, near Haines Junction in Canada's Yukon Territory.

OSLO, Norway — Canadian glaciers that are the world's third biggest store of ice after Antarctica and Greenland seem headed for an irreversible melt that will push up sea levels, scientists said Thursday.

About 20 percent of the ice in glaciers, on islands such as Ellesmere or Devon off northern Canada, could vanish by the end of the 21st century in a melt that would add 1.4 inch (3.5 cm) to global sea levels, they said.

Governments are trying to understand every possible centimeter of sea level rise caused by global warming, to plan how to protect cities from New York to Shanghai or low-lying coasts from Ghana to Bangladesh. "We believe that the mass loss is irreversible in the foreseeable future," assuming continued climate change, the scientists, based in the Netherlands and the United States, wrote in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Lead author Jan Lenaerts of the University of Utrecht told Reuters that the trend seemed unstoppable because a thaw of white glaciers would expose dark-colored tundra that would soak up more of the sun's heat and further accelerate the melt.

A total melt of the glaciers would take several centuries. Climate change is warming the Arctic faster than the global average.

Most past estimates of Canada's glaciers, based on less precise data of their size and melt rates, pointed to a smaller contribution to sea level rise of perhaps three-quarters of an inch (2 centimeters) this century, Lenaerts said.

The U.N. panel of climate scientists has projected that world sea levels will rise by 7 to 23 inches (18 to 59 centimeters) this century, or more if a thaw of vast ice sheets in Antarctica or Greenland accelerates.

Canada's glaciers are little-studied and often lumped into the panel's estimates with ice in Alaska, Patagonia, Russia and Svalbard off north Norway.

"These glaciers are a significant part of the whole equation and of future sea level rise," David Vaughan, head of the ice2sea program for studying global warming based at the British Antarctic Survey in England, told Reuters. "We can't afford to ignore them." Vaughan was not among the authors of Thursday's study.

"Most attention goes out to Greenland and Antarctica, which is understandable because they are the two largest ice bodies in the world," Michiel van den Broeke, a co-author of the study at Utrecht University, said in a statement. "We want to show that the Canadian ice caps should be included in the calculations."

The experts used satellite data of the extent of Canadian glaciers over the past decade to work out a model to project their decline. The projection of a 20 percent loss of volume was based on a scenario in which world temperatures would rise by 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) this century and by 8 degrees C (14.4 degrees F) in the Canadian Arctic. That's well within most U.N. scenarios.

Copyright Thomson Reuters 2013. Check for restrictions at: http://about.reuters.com/fulllegal.asp 

Eleven killer whales that were “locked in” by ice in a Canadian bay, with only a small area of open water for them to surface, are now apparently free, possibly due to a change in current that helped break open a path to the sea, the mayor of a nearby village said Thursday.

Two scouts sent to check on the killer whales around 8 a.m. local time found a passage of water had been created in Hudson Bay all of the way to the open sea – nearly 25 miles away -- and the ice hole that the marine mammals had been trapped in was empty, said Petah Inukpuk, mayor of Inukjuak, a remote Inuit village home to 1,800, in Quebec.

“They are free. They are no longer here. When there is a new moon, the water current is activated. It could have helped … completely trap them, but in this case it caused an open passage out to the open water,” he told NBC News, adding that they probably were freed overnight. “It was mother nature that helped them. ... They are no longer icelocked.”

A hunter had found the killer whales, also known as orcas, on Tuesday morning in the bay in northeastern Canada about one mile from shore. Two of the orcas appeared to be adults; the remaining nine were smaller in size, said Inukpuk, 61. Other reports said there were 12 orcas in the pod.

Canada's fisheries and oceans department said it received confirmation from the community "that winds and tides shifted overnight, opening the ice that had trapped the whales." Two of its scientists were en route to Inukjuak to collect scientific information and work with the community.

A video taken by villager Clement Rousseau on Tuesday revealed a tough situation facing the killer whales: the water opening appeared to be just large enough for a few of them to surface at a time. 

“They are in a confined area,” Inukpuk told NBC News on Wednesday, noting then that there was “no more open water.”

“From time to time, they are in a panic state and other times they are gone for a long period of time, probably looking for another open water (space) which they are unable to find," Inukpuk said. "They keep going back to the same spot.”

The villagers held a meeting Wednesday night and crafted a plan similar to a rescue performed in 1988 of two California gray whales that got stuck in ice in Alaska. In Operation Breakthrough, which made international headlines and inspired the 2012 film "Big Miracle," Eskimo whalers cut more than a half mile of holes for the whales to travel through on their way to open sea. Two Soviet icebreakers helped by crushing a critical thick wall of ice that blocked their path and freed the animals after 20 days, according to a story on the rescue by the Los Angeles Times.

Twenty of the Inukjuak villagers were tasked with doing much the same: they were going to remove the broken ice around the area and use chainsaws to enlargen the hole, which was getting increasingly smaller. A neighboring Inuit village had also offered a large chainsaw capable of cutting the ice. The villagers even got offers of help from far afield, including Germany and England.

"We were prepared to endure it, make their breathing hole bigger and create another breathing hole nearby. Enlarge it, going step by step," he said. "We were prepared to do that method because the closest icebreaker was ten days away … without assistance they would not have made it."

Clement Rousseau

Killer whales that were trapped in the ice near Inukjuak, photographed on Jan. 8, 2013.

A Canadian fisheries official told CBC.ca that some icebreakers were being used in the Saint Lawrence River, where three commercial ships got stuck this week. 

Geoff Carroll, a wildlife biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game who helped release the two California gray whales, said Operation Breakthrough showed the power of the simpler methods.

“Our experience up here was that it seemed like the local knowledge and the low-tech approaches to working with the whales were the ones that worked best,” Carroll said. “It seemed like there were lots of high-tech efforts made to get those whales out and they kind of failed one after the other. What really worked was when we got local guys with chainsaws cutting one hole after another and we could kind of walk the whales out that way.”

There have been reports of other whales getting caught in ice, but it was an anomaly for killer whales -- technically in the oceanic dolphin family -- which tend to hunt around the ice, said Deborah Giles, a graduate student researcher at the University of California, Davis, who has studied killer whales for eight years.

Giles recalled that one pod of orcas died in 2005 when they were trapped in thick ice, and Paul Wade, a research fisheries biologist at the National Marine Mammal Laboratory in Seattle, noted there have been some other similar cases, too.

Wade said he watched videos of the pod near Inukjuak online and thought some were engaging in normal behavior -- such as "spyhopping," when adult males shoot straight up out of the water -- while others appeared agitated. He said it looked like the pod included two adult males, several juveniles and female adults or younger adult males. The group was most likely related, said Giles.

Photoblog: Images of whales that were stuck in ice

Killer whales are highly social and typically travel in pods numbering from two to 15, though there can be larger groups, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. They are most numerous in colder waters, such as Antarctica, Alaska and Norway, although they can also be found in temperate and tropical waters. Different groupings have distinctive whistles and pulsed calls that are thought to be used by them to communicate.

Inukpuk said killer whales were not spotted in the area every summer, but every second or third one. However, this was the first time that they were "locked in,” he said.

“Why these whales hung around so long is a mystery,” Wade said. But he added: “Even the types of whales that live in the ice a lot or much closer to the ice more frequently than killer whales -- they make mistakes as well.”

The winter was unusual this year in that the bay did not freeze up as it normally does at the end of November or beginning of December. There was open water after Christmas but earlier this week it got "really cold," leaving just an area of water the size of a swimming pool open that was getting smaller, Inukpuk said.

"People here were very much ready to help and it is surprising because the killer whales are (our) competitors for the same species," such as seals, he said. "We were ready to give aid to make sure that they survived until help could come."

He said they were "very pleased" with the outcome and he had a wish for the pod, too: "I hope they find a good meal and they have a hearty feast because they are probably pretty hungry."

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Chris Hadfield via Google+

Australian wildfire: Look closely, you can see the flames from orbit ...

Astronaut Chris Hadfield is making a name for himself as the International Space Station's first Canadian commander, the "Singing Spaceman" and Star Trek skipper William Shatner's Twitter buddy — but he's also one heck of a photographer.

Since his arrival at the station on Dec. 21, Hadfield has posted more than 100 pictures to Twitter and Google+, most of them showing amazing views of Earth below. Between his official duties and his unofficial Earth-watching sessions, how does he find time to sleep?

"Yes, I should sleep more on station," he told one follower, "but the view from the window is like a perpetual magnet, too wondrous to ignore."

The space station's six residents all take turns behind the lens, but some astronauts take the job way more seriously than others: Notable shooters from past orbital stints include NASA's Scott Kelly, Douglas Wheelock, Ron Garan and Don Pettit, as well as Japan's Soichi Noguchi and Dutch astronaut Andre Kuipers. Hadfield is sure to take his place among them.

His favorite hangout is the seven-windowed Cupola observation deck, which provides an unparalleled view of Earth. His favorite camera? "We use primarily Nikon F2s and F3s, with a variety of lenses," he said on Twitter. "We even take them out on spacewalks, into the hard vacuum."

To get those awesome pictures of Earth landscapes, he brings out the Big Lens. "The big lens is Nikkor 600 mm, used with a 2-fold converter = 1200 mm," he tweeted. "Available for just US$10,300."

When you consider that the space station's crew is delivering pictures that no one on Earth can, that seems like a small price to pay. Check out a few of the recent masterpieces from outer space:

Chris Hadfield via Twitter

Chris Hadfield photographing Earth from the International Space Station's Cupola, using the big lens. http://pic.twitter.com/kL9iQdAN

Chris Hadfield via Twitter

Australia: The dryness creates colors and textures that make the Outback immediately recognizable from space. http://pic.twitter.com/0D4lvgJt

Chris Hadfield via Twitter

It's hard to believe the colours of the Bahamas from space. http://pic.twitter.com/0DhYXmel

Chris Hadfield via Twitter

Humans need straight lines, nature doesn't. Indecisive river and orderly farmers, central Asia. http://pic.twitter.com/BIL8Syqw

Chris Hadfield via Twitter

Seattle, WA: Look carefully, you can see Pike Place Market. http://pic.twitter.com/0OFm0iO0

Chris Hadfield via Twitter

Glacier tongues in the Himalayas. http://pic.twitter.com/A9xe7AfG

Correction for 8 p.m. ET Jan. 8: The original headline for this item called Hadfield the space station's skipper, but it's a little too early to call him that. NASA astronaut Kevin Ford is currently the station commander, and Hadfield is a flight engineer. Hadfield will take on the title of commander when Ford heads back down to Earth in March.

Update for 1 p.m. ET Jan. 9: I've added a link to Hadfield's Google+ page as well as a couple of fresh images, showing the Australian wildfires and a Central Asian landscape.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.