Monster Hurricane Ike as seen from ISS

The astronauts aboard the International Space Station snapped this picture of the gigantic Hurricane Ike as it churns across the Gulf of Mexico toward a Texas landfall this weekend.

The storm, which has forced the evacuation of Johnson Space Center and the station's Mission Control Center in Houston, is covering most of the Gulf now and is an impressive site even from space.

You can see a much larger, higher-resolution version of this image by clicking on it. We'll update the situation at Johnson Space Center in the morning. For now, the latest on the storm can be found at the floridatoday.com home page.