“Hey, I can see my house from here!” tweeted NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman, MS ’06, from his perch on the International Space Station, 240 miles about Earth, in July.

Wiseman, 39, a naval aviator and test pilot who earned his master’s degree from the Whiting School’s Engineering for Professionals program, blasted off from the Baikonur Cosmodome in Kazakhstan on a six-month science mission last May 29, and immediately began chronicling his adventures in space the modern way: via Twitter and Vine.

@astro_reid’s stunning photos of everything from the aurora borealis and the snaking Nile River to massive glaciers flowing across Canada, the golden sands of Africa, and cheering astronauts watching the World Cup from space have earned him a reputation as the most social media-savvy spaceman ever. In fact, Wiseman made international news June 9 when he sent the first-ever Vine from space: a six-second time-lapse video (distilled from a 92-minute original) of the line separating the sunlit and dark sides of the Earth.

Since then, he has amassed more than 250,000 followers, who check their Twitter feeds daily for breathtaking photos and amusing quick-hit videos of life at the ISS. In September, he even participated in an in-flight social media event during which fans submitted questions about life on the International Space Station via YouTube videos and tweets, and the flight engineer answered them live on NASA TV.

“We’re just lucky to live in this day where, when I take a photograph with a camera … we can email it straight into our Twitter feeds, and it just makes it so much easier to share this experience,” he told Time magazine in August. “It’s almost just become a little collateral duty of ours, so you don’t even think about it through the day, it’s so easy.”

This experience is a dream-come-true for the Timonium, Maryland, native who had always wanted to be an astronaut.

He told Johns Hopkins Engineering that he believes his background in systems engineering “made my application to [NASA] more appealing.”

When asked what he plans to do once this stint on the ISS is over, he said, “Go up again.”