60 satellite images of Earth

Webdesigner depot has 60 beautiful satellite photos of Earth.

The Dasht-e Kevir, or valley of desert, is the largest desert in Iran. It is a primarily uninhabited wasteland, composed of mud and salt marshes covered with crusts of salt that protect the meager moisture from completely evaporating.

(Via The Presurfer)

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

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Anonymous

Can anyone explain how the quote below relates to the colors being so off? I understand that they haven’t been manipulated (well, I’m assuming they haven’t) but why aren’t they captured as we’d see them?

From TFA:
“Various combinations of the eight Landsat 7 spectral bands were selected to create the vivid RGB composites that we have featured.”
- KurtMac
  
  “Landsat 7 will fulfill its mission by providing repetitive, synoptic coverage of continental surfaces; spectral bands in the visible, near-infrared, short-wave, and thermal infrared regions of the electromagnetic spectrum…” http://www.gsfc.nasa.gov/gsfc/service/gallery/fact_sheets/earthsci/landsat/landsat7.htm
  
  Long and short of it, they are composite images of different wavelengths, and they assign each a nifty color to come up with the exaggerated results. Same thing they do to Hubble pictures by assigning colors to different elements and wavelengths to make pretty space pictures, as opposed to if you looked at say, the Orion Nebula, through a telescope with your own eye it just appears a smudgy grayish-blue.
- madsci
  
  It means that the satellite didn’t capture the image in the red, green, and blue bands that our eyes see. They could have been created from any mix of bands (I know some of the red is actually infrared) assigned to the red, green, and blue values.
  
  So maybe red is 0.4 * infrared band 1 + 0.6 * infrared band 2, for example. They’d normally be picked to make it easy to see what the user is looking for, but it gives you some leeway for artistic interpretation of a scene sensed in a way that doesn’t directly match what a human would see.
agroman

There is another archive or nice looking satellite images at: http://landsat.org/landsat_gallery/
Remus Shepherd

Ah, my pictures. A few that didn’t make the news are here. The original collection is here.

There is no photomanipulation done to these, although we used photoshop to put the bands together. All we did was put three of Landsat’s eight bands in a RGB combination, and then adjust the contrast. Most of them use infrared bands; some of them are true-color, using the bands that approximate human vision.

I created about 80% of the images in the original show, and about half of the ones in the linked article. I might not be remembered for anything, but I know these images will be.
Remus Shepherd

The Landsat images are U.S. public domain — free to use for commercial or non-commercial purposes for US citizens. The taxpayers funded them, the taxpayers can have ‘em. I’m not sure of the foreign rights but I can ask when I get back to the office after the holidays.
- basicio
  
  Excellent, thanks!
Anonymous

just love the shifting sands of bahamas
Mark Crummett

EARTH! Just look at it!
Anonymous

great images, impressive
basicio

Does anybody know what kind of license these are released under? Can they be re-used for things other than a desktop background or something similar? I may be missing something obvious, but I haven’t been able to find any information at any of the related websites.
- MrsBug
  
  I would love to know that as well. I’d pay to have one of these images blown up and mounted. They’d be awesome art on yer LR wall. :)
Anonymous

I am totally going to georeference some of these and use them for my cartographic principles class next semester.
strangefriend

‘But a being possessing hyper-intelligence might be able to
create an entire beautiful, colorful planet in the middle of
an infinite Universe.’
OK. But was this the equivalent of a PhD paper, or just finger-painting by a kindergartner?
People can be self important sometimes.
CANTFIGHTTHEDITE

Yes, all hail the Flying Spaghetti Monster and the great beauty bestowed by his noodly appendage!
IamInnocent

Yeah…
So ‘hyper’ that it has to be something radically different from mere intelligence since this one seems to be the highest manifestation of humanity’s great limitations.
apoxia

Really? To me it just looks like a random mess. If I was the creator everything would be laid out in a grid. Now if you could find me a part of the earth which is a grid, then I would be impressed, but no more likely to believe in a creator.