Rockall: Visible from space or what?

It's always nice to get some positive feedback/input from our readers, and we are this week obliged to Rick Lones who has just sent us a lovely photograph and "regards from the Free State of New Hampshire". Rick explains that the image is...

...a picture of Rockall as photographed from space by the crew of Columbia during its last mission. The Blessed Isle is clearly visible in this stunning photograph, about halfway between that little bumpy protrusion of continental shelf and those weird disconnected islandy bits off to the upper left of Scotland. Good to know our tax dollars are finally being well spent by NASA, but one wishes they'd used a somewhat longer lens.

Stunning it most certainly is, but having consulted the charts we reckon that Rick has identified the mysterious island of St Kilda which lies about 40 nautical miles west of the Outer Hebrides.

Rockall is more or less 230 nautical miles west of North Uist, so it must be a bit further out, as we've indicated. Nevertheless, this is a good excuse to publish some snaps of St Kilda, taken on our 2003 Rockall Ho! adventure:

More pics of our North Atlantic jolly can be found in the The Rockall Ho! 2003 picture gallery. Sadly, though, we cannot at this time produce solid photographic evidence that the sacred islet of Rockall is - as it rightly should be - visible from space.