CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) -- Israel's first astronaut has captured images of smoke from the burning rain forest and a Mediterranean dust storm from his perch aboard space shuttle Columbia, Israeli scientists said Thursday.

They said the images gathered by Ilan Ramon will help researchers better understand climate changes -- one of the goals of Columbia's research flight, which finally hit orbit two weeks ago after almost two years of delays.

There was a scarcity of dust storms during the mission, the researchers said. But Ramon managed to get images of a storm over his homeland earlier this week -- the only time in the past two weeks that a significant amount of dust was present in the atmosphere over the Mediterranean.

"We just lucked out,'' said Tel Aviv University's Joachim Joseph, an atmospheric physicist who is overseeing the experiment. A plane that took off from Crete made simultaneous observations.

January is a particularly poor time for dust storms, but that's where Columbia's flight ended up after the repeated delays. The Mediterranean is the scientists' primary area of interest, but they also have gathered images of a small dust plume over the Atlantic off the African coast.