To understand Harvey’s scale, you need a perspective from space

After making landfall on Friday, Tropical Storm Harvey is still ravaging southeast Texas five days later — and pictures from space show just how massive this storm has remained since then. NASA astronaut Randy Bresnik snapped the above photo of Harvey from the International Space Station at 2:27PM ET yesterday, showing that the storm is still a monster. It’s a poignant reminder as Houston area residents continue to battle flood waters, and emergency crews rescue people stranded in their homes.

Harvey’s ferocity is the culmination of many different inopportune factors. The waters in the Gulf of Mexico are particularly warm right now, fueling the storm and making it a brutal Category 4 hurricane when it first hit Texas. Making matters worse is the fact that it stalled out over the state for a couple of days due to lack of winds in the upper atmosphere. The storm’s trajectory then took it back into the Gulf of Mexico yesterday, where it may gather some strength from the warm ocean waters.

Now, the National Hurricane Center expects Harvey to veer east and head over southwest Louisiana where it’s forecasted to dump rain on New Orleans. That could also be a major problem, since the city’s pumping system for removing rainwater is not in the best shape. This storm could still do some more tremendous damage to the Gulf Coast, with days of rain still ahead.