Several of the oldest cities of northwestern Europe are highlighted in this astronaut photograph acquired just after midnight on Aug. 10, 2011. While the landscape is dotted with light clusters from individual urban areas, the metropolitan areas of London, Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam appear much brighter because of their large light footprints.
A massive bloom of phytoplankton creates brilliant shades of blues and greens that explode across the Barents Sea”a rare Earth observation treat because the Barents Sea is obscured by cloud cover roughly 80 percent of the time during summer.
Beach vacationers on the Outer Banks of North Carolina recently experienced hazy conditions from smoke that drifted in from Virginia's Great Dismal Swamp wildfire.
The Crew Earth Observations team at NASA's Johnson Space Center sends daily ground targets to astronauts on the International Space Station to photograph. But sometimes the striking displays visible from orbit inspire the crew to take imagery on their own.
Residents west of Boulder, Colo., had to evacuate last September during the Fourmile Canyon fire. As they returned to their homes, the U.S. Geological Survey cautioned that the scorched surroundings now had become ripe for flooding. The floods”and another evacuation”came on July 13, 2011.
Clear skies allowed the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA's Terra satellite to collect this largely unobstructed view of the Arctic in early July 2011.
Bangladesh typically experiences a warm, rainy monsoon from June to October. This year, the rains had already transformed its northeastern region by mid-July.
As the International Space Station passed over Romania on the evening of June 15, the crew turned its camera to the east and snapped this striking night image of southern Italy.
At the Nabro Volcano in the East African nation of Eritrea, the flow of lava comes to life in this striking satellite image viewed with the infrared portion of the light spectrum.
On Sunday, June 26, the Souris River crested in Minot, N.D., with flooding reaching depths of 14 feet in some places. Rising more than four feet in just 18 hours on Friday, June 24, the river flooded some 4,000 homes as it raged through the city at a rate of 27,600 cubic feet per second, five times the fastest rate recorded during the last three decades.
