A 2019 short by Swiss animators Frederic Siegel and Benjamin Morard in which:
Leaving for his dream job, a satellite technician keeps solitude at bay by constantly texting with his old friends. After neglecting his duties a satellite leaves its orbit which causes the worlds network to collapse.
A gallery of satellite images taken – not vertically – but at an angle, published by Planet Labs.
To wit:
…the satellite imagery we’re most familiar with — taken straight down — flattens and obscures the visual cues we get from perspective, making the imagery appear like maps, not photos… from an angle, the view becomes altogether different: the mountains rise to their commanding height, valleys regain their depth, and background features recede into the distance. It’s like getting a view out the window of an airplane 450 kilometers high.
From top: Monte Fitz Roy in Patagonia; Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; Sao Paulo, Brazil; Klyuchevskaya volcano in Russia and Bilbao in Spain.
The Earth ‘by night’, captured (in 2012) by the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite on board NASA’s Suomi NPP Satellite.
MORE: Black Marble: Amazing Earth at Night Photos from Space (Space.com)
Interactive satellite images of Dublin for your timewasting pleasure.
Conor Delaney writes:
Satellite image of Dublin, near infrared highlighting the vegetation. Make you own pictures here…
A proposal by ‘computational and speculative designer’ Benedikt Groβ and San Francisco based geographer Joey Lee to ‘run a satellite image based alphabet searching algorithm’ to identify man made structures that look like letters of the alphabet when viewed from above. They say:
..we will traverse the entire planet’s worth of satellite imagery and develop the tools and methods necessary to map these features hiding in plain sight.
Well might you scoff, but the project is already fully funded on Kickstarter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDUOQjNZEp4
A Google Earth Engine timelapse project showing 28 years of melting glaciers, city development and rainforest depletion as seen from space.
Humans, eh?
Google Earth images are compiled from different datasets of satellite imagery taken months, perhaps years apart. Sometimes the process of stiching the smaller images together includes anomalies such as differences in the appearance of the terrain during different seasons.
In his ‘Juxtapose‘ project, artist Daniel Schwartz compiles tasty examples of this split screen exotica.
Some of Digital Globe’s best satellite images of 2012. They’re still taking votes on their Facebook page.
(Above: the wreck of the Costa Concordia; Mount Fuji in Japan; the Burning Man Festival in Nevada; the Lady Of The North mine sculpture in Northern England, and the Space Shuttle Endeavour on top of a 747)
Jason Walsh writes:
The current satellite image of Ireland. What kind of cruel joke is this? Look at all that no cloud over the ocean that we’d be more then happy to have over Ireland. Instead we get darn near 100% cloud over the country.
NASA already has a long history of compositing images of the earth (front and back).
Now the Russians have gone one better with their geostationary Electro-L weather satellite: its 121 megapixel images (1 km per pixel) were used to create the above timelapse video of the phases of Gaia.
This requires nothing less than full screen and 1080p for the required effect.
