Since astronauts are travelling so fast in orbit, why don the photographs look smeared?
If you do the calculation for the amount of ground smear expected based on the shutter speed of the camera and the velocity of the Shuttle relative to the ground, you would expect that the ground resolved distance could be no better than about 30 m. Because we have much better resolution (i.e. boats in harbors, narrow roads), we know that consciously or unconsciously, astronauts track the Earth when they take a photo, so the resolution is actually better than you would calculate.
