Hurricane Milton: Jaw-dropping images taken from space show the storm rapidly intensifying as it approaches Florida

Eerie new footage from the International Space Station (ISS) captures Hurricane Milton explosively intensifying into a Category 5 storm as it moves toward Florida.

The video was taken by one of the ISS's external cameras as it flew over the hurricane at 10:28 a.m. EDT (2:28 p.m. GMT on Monday (Oct. 7). It shows the extremely dangerous storm's pinhole eye and powerful 180 mph (290 km/h) winds, according to the National Hurricane Center. Pinhole eye hurricanes are storms with tiny eyes, just a few nautical miles in diameter, which can rapidly intensify to become extremely powerful and deadly.

"This is nothing short of astronomical. I am at a loss for words to meteorologically describe [to] you the storms small eye and intensity," Noah Bergren, a meteorologist at Fox 35 Orlando, wrote on the social platform X. "This hurricane is nearing the mathematical limit of what Earth's atmosphere over this ocean water can produce."

Milton transformed from a Category 1 to a Category 5 in a matter of hours on Monday, defying hurricane models and stunning forecasters to become the fifth most intense Atlantic storm in recorded History. It has since dropped to a Category 4 storm, a strength it is expected to remain at until it makes landfall at Tampa Bay on Wednesday night (Oct. 9) or Thursday (Oct. 10) morning.

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This is far from the only footage of the monster storm captured from space. Images of Milton from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) show the hurricane spinning just above the Yucatan Peninsula.

The black and red toward the center indicate cold temperatures, which shows that convection — where heat and moisture are transported vertically in the atmosphere — runs deep, indicating more intense thunderstorms, according to NOAA.