What’s cooler than watching a volcano blow its top? Watching the event through the safety of satellite images from space, as evidenced in these striking pictures from NASA’s archives.

Text by Chelsea Lin | Photo editing by Mike Hipple

The International Space Station just happened to be cruising over Russia’s Kuril Islands on June 12, 2009, snapping this image of Sarychev volcano, one of the islands’ most active peaks. Look for the combination of billowing brown ash clouds and white steam that illustrate the early stages of eruption.

A satellite didn’t capture this magical image — the photo was taken by astronaut Jeffrey N. Williams, an Expedition 13 crewmember on the International Space Station, on May 23, 2006. The erupting volcano is the Cleveland, of Alaska’s Aleutian Islands, and the astronaut’s unique vantage point allows you to see the delicate ash plume drifting towards the southwest.

It’s hard to tell where the ash plume stops and the beautiful Grímsvötn volcano begins in this image taken by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer aboard the Terra satellite on May 12, 2011. Iceland’s most active volcano generally produces non-explosive basaltic eruptions, although its location beneath a glacier means the melting ice and hot lava has the potential to create an impressive initial explosion.

Although many satellite images of volcanoes capture ash plumes as they drift away from the summit, this unusual picture shows the March 29, 2007 eruption of the Shiveluch volcano on Russian Federation’s Kamchatka Peninsula blowing its top — and the cloud majestically hanging in the air. The cloud looks so small, it’s hard to tell it was actually shot from 32,000 feet in the air.

Think this looks cold? Heard Island is part of a group of barren volcanic islands between Madagascar and Antarctica — and proof of an eruption of Mawson Peak is shown in these images collected by the Advanced Land Imager on the Earth Observing-1 satellite. By April 2013, lava was trickling down the volcano’s side.

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From the height of NASA’s Terra satellite, this image of a May 8, 2012, eruption on Pagan Island in the Mariana Islands looks like a modest smoke signal rather than the plume from a stratovolcanic explosion. Pagan Island consists of two stratovolcanoes connected by an isthmus; historically, most of the island’s eruptions have begun with the North Pagan volcano.

More than 40,000 people were evacuated in the area surrounding Mayon volcano in the Philippines on Dec. 22, 2009, as fountains of hot lava shot from the mountain. This natural-color image was captured just a few days before by the Advanced Land Imager on NASA’s Earth Observing-1 satellite — you can see a predictive narrow plume of ash as well as lava flows from previous eruptions.

Eyjafjallajökull, the Icelandic volcano whose name has stumped a thousand television reporters — for the record, it’s pronounced EY-yah-FYAT-lah-YOH-koot — produced such a massive ash plume that it affected international air travel after its April 17, 2010, eruption. This infrared image captured by the Advanced Land Imager instrument aboard NASA’s Earth Observing-1 spacecraft shows the cloud to the bottom left.

An Expedition 34 crew member snapped this image of Sakurajima in Japan from the International Space Station. The volcano has a number of different eruption craters — the ash plume visible here is said to have originated from either Minami-dake or Showa craters — and is particularly interesting because of its proximity to large urban areas on Kyushu.

Sadly, the hues of this Technicolor image of Mount Belinda in the South Sandwich Islands (captured Sept. 23, 2005, by the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer onboard NASA’s Terra satellite) aren’t exactly accurate. The red indicates heat, blue shows snow, white is the volcano’s steam, and gray, appropriately, illustrates the volcanic ash.