Striking Earth’s Images from Space (18 pictures)
The European Space Agency (ESA) is Europe’s gateway to space. An international organisation with 20 Member States, the ESA in its current form was created in 1975. Since then they have shared amazing research and images for the world to learn from. With almost 12,000 high-resolution images available through their website, their extensive archive is a great online resource for research and inspiration.
One particularly striking archive available is Observing the Earth, a collection of satellite images of Earth. As the ESA explains:
“Earth Observation images show the world through a wide-enough frame so that complete large-scale phenomena can be observed to an accuracy and entirety it would take an army of ground-level observers to match. A single satellite image has the potential to show the spread of air pollution across a continent, the precise damage done in a region struck by an earthquake or forest fires, or the entire span of a 500-km hurricane from the calmness of its eye to its outermost storm fronts. Earth Observation provides objective coverage across both space and time. The same space-based sensor gathers data from sites across the world, including places too remote or otherwise inaccessible for ground-based data acquisition.
While satellite acquisitions are most often presented in the form of pictures, they are actually digital data. So the same raw data can be processed with computer software in many different ways to extract whatever information the particular end-user requires.”
