Striking photos snapped by an astronaut on the International Space Station shows an “immense ash cloud” blanketing the continent of Australia as massive wildfires continue to rage.

The photographs, captured by European Space Agency astronaut Luca Parmitano, depicts the great cloud of ash more than 200 miles below the space habitat. Parmitano shared the tweets in both English and Italian.

Parmitano later wrote that none of the astronauts “had ever seen fires at such terrifying scale.”

Nearly 30 people have died in the fires. Tens of millions of acres have burned and a billion animals are estimated to have perished in the blazes.