Stranded astronauts Barry 'Butch' Wilmore and Sunita 'Suni' Williams are nearing their return date, and have now revealed the hardest factor of their nine-month stay aboard the International Space Station (ISS).

On a crisp January evening, as the International Space Station (ISS) streaked across the sky at 17,500 miles per hour, Charline Giroud, an amateur astrophotographer and biochemist at the University of Oxford, pointed her telescope toward the heavens. Her goal was ambitious: to capture an image of an astronaut during a spacewalk.

In a news briefing following the landing, Nasa spokesperson Steve Stich said: "From a human perspective, all of us feel happy about the successful landing, but then there's a piece of us - all of us - that wish it would have been the way we had planned it.