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How NASA visualizes large datasets
Horace Mitchell, director of the NASA Scientific Visualization Studio discusses the process behind their visualization that shows estimated surface currents around the world, Perpetual Ocean. Once we...
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Earth as Art book from NASA
The Earth as Art is a compilation of NASA satellite imagery that shows the planet from a new perspective. The sensors on the satellite measure light outside the visible range, which makes for beautiful...
View ArticleA high resolution tour of the vegetation on Earth
NOAA visualized global vegetation over a year, and the result is beautiful: We've seen forestry maps before, some quite detailed, but this is the first I've seen it at this granularity over a period of...
View ArticleWhat Antarctica looks like underneath the ice
Based largely on satellite data and the results of an airborne data collection mission compiled by the British Antarctic Survey, Bedmap2 by NASA Goddard is a construction of what Antarctica looks like...
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Holiday lights from space
You've likely seen the classic globe image that shows Earth at night. It's a composite image using data collected over a nine-day period, so you kind of see what the planet looks like if it were night...
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The first photo of the United States by NASA satellite
In 1974, NASA published their first satellite photo of the contiguous United States by stitching together a bunch of individual images. A giant photo map of the contiguous 48 states of the United...
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Mapping ice layers with radar data
I don't know exactly how much data NASA has in the bank, but I think it's a lot. Explained in the video below, they estimated the age of ice layers in Greenland by flying a plane over the Greenland Ice...
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Life cycle of Earth’s carbon dioxide
The Cartography and Geovisualization Group at Oregon State University and NASA visualized a one-year life cycle of carbon dioxide in an interactive video map. The visualization is a product of a...
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Journey to Pluto
The New Horizons spacecraft launched on January 19, 2006 and is set to fly by Pluto next week on July 14, 2015. The New York Times provides a short documentary on the journey and the hope for what the...
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Pluto reflectance map: Whale and the Donut
Using images taken by New Horizons between June 27 and July 3, this is the latest NASA map informally named the Whale and the Donut. Now, use your imagination here (because space!). The dark area on...
View ArticleThe Sun in ultra-HD
x Daang, NASA. Using images of the sun taken in space, NASA constructed this super-detailed view of what the star looks like. In space, NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, keeps an eye on our...
View ArticlePlant life cycle shows a breathing Earth
NASA mapped the annual cycle of all plant life on the planet in this animated map. Satellite instruments reveal the yearly cycle of plant life on the land and in the water. On land, the images...
View ArticleOne-year time-lapse of Earth
x Time-lapse from space by NASA: On July 20, 2015, NASA released to the world the first image of the sunlit side of Earth captured by the space agency’s EPIC camera on NOAA’s DSCOVR satellite. The...
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Oil fires in Iraq seen from above
Though far away, there’s still a lot you can see, as the NASA Earth Observatory notes: On August 17, 2016, the Operational Land Imager (OLI) on Landsat 8 acquired an image (above) of dense smoke plumes...
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Mississippi drainage
Horace Mitchell for NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio mapped the massive drainage basin that is the Mississippi Watershed. The Mississippi Watershed is the largest drainage basin in North America...
View ArticleFollowing the carbon dioxide
This animated visualization from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center shows a model of carbon dioxide swirl around the planet, “using observations from NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO-2)...
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New images of Earth at night
NASA just released a composite map of the world at night using satellite imagery from 2016. This is the first nighttime map since 2012, but the team behind the work hopes for bigger things with a more...
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Detailed satellite view of iceberg break
Using the thermal signature, NASA provides a detailed view of the break: The false-color image was captured by Landsat’s Thermal Infrared Sensor (TIRS). It shows the relative warmth or coolness of the...
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Thermal structure of Hurricane Maria
Hurricane Maria touched down in Puerto Rico. This visualization by Joshua Stevens at NASA shows what the thermal structure of the storm looked like, based on data collected by the Terra satellite....
View ArticleSimulation shows swirling of smoke, sea salt, and dust around the world
NASA. Data. Good. Tracking the aerosols carried on the winds let scientists see the currents in our atmosphere. This visualization follows sea salt, dust, and smoke from July 31 to November 1, 2017,...
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