My Weblog: Photography

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The Earth Observatory is a website run by NASA's Earth Observing System Project Science Office, which brings together imagery from many different satellites and astronaut missions. The website publishes beautiful images with highly detailed descriptions.

"The Bear Glacier on the Kenai Peninsula along the Gulf of Alaska seen by the IKONOS satellite took this on August 8, 2005. This image shows the ablation zone where the glacier is primarily losing ice. Upslope from the lake, the foot of the glacier is riddled with crevasses - cracks in the ice caused by the glacier's movement over a rough surface. Down the middle of the glacier run dark gray stripes. As a glacier moves, it picks up dirt and debris from the rocks it passes. When two glaciers merge, as they have here, the dirt and debris they carry form parallel stripes, or medial moraines, on the ice surface."

"South of Khartoum, Sudan, where the White and Blue Nile Rivers join, a dizzying arrangement of irrigated fields stretches out across the state of El Gezira. The several bare-looking patches are small villages. This image was captured by the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) on NASA's Terra satellite on December 25, 2006."

"Cloudless skies allowed a clear view of Tibet in mid-December 2008. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) flying onboard NASA's Terra satellite captured this true-color, image on December 18, 2008. Snow caps some mountain peaks, and ice partially covers some lakes in this high-altitude region, nicknamed the "Roof of the World."

"Two cyclones are seen, after forming in tandem in November 2006. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) onboard NASA's Terra satellite took this picture of the two cyclones south of Iceland on November 20 (South is up in image)."

"During the last ice age, Canada's Akimiski Island was buried under several thousand meters of ice, but since its retreat, the island has rebounded (risen in elevation) and new beach areas have emerged, streams and lakes have formed, and trees and other vegetation have colonized the new territory. This image of Akimiski Island was captured by the Landsat 7 satellite on August 9, 2000."

"This image shows a colorful bloom of phytoplankton throughout the Black Sea on June 4, 2008, along the southern coast near the Turkish cities of Sinop and Samsun. The natural-color image was captured by the MODIS instrument on NASA's Aqua satellite."

"Two-toned dust plumes blew northward off the coast of Libya on October 26, 2007, as the MODIS instrument on NASA's Terra satellite took this picture. While plumes in the west are beige, reminiscent of the Sahara's sands, the plumes in the east are distinctly darker."

"The setting sun glints off the Amazon River and numerous lakes in its floodplain in this astronaut photograph from August 19, 2008. About 150 kilometers of the Amazon is shown here, about 1,000 kilometers inland from the Atlantic Ocean. This image was acquired on August 19, 2008 by the by the Expedition 17 crew of the International Space Station."

"Harrat Khaybar in Saudi Arabia contains a wide range of volcanic rock types and spectacular landforms, several of which are represented in this photograph taken by an astronaut abourd the International Space Station on March 31, 2008. Jabal ("mountain" in Arabic) al Qidr is built from several generations of dark, fluid basalt lava flows. Jabal Abyad, in the center of the image, was formed from a more viscous, silica-rich lava classified as a rhyolite."

Via The Big Picture