15 Incredible Views Of Cities From Space
Published 9:26 am, Sunday, November 24, 2013
In the past, we've posted some incredible views of Earth's most breathtaking natural features from the European Space Agency (ESA), which has been observing the Earth with satellites for decades.
It turns out that natural features aren't the only thing that the ESA has seen from space — they've turned their lenses on some of Earth's most iconic cities as well.
The ESA has launched some of the most advanced Earth-observation satellites ever, including the Envistat, which circled the Earth from 2002 until 2012.
Every week, the ESA releases a new image — plucked from the huge pool of Envistat and other satellite images — on their website.
This photo of Dubai, United Arab Emirates was taken in 2012. The blue mass at the center is the man-made Burj Khalifa "Lake." To its right is the Burj Khalifa tower, the tallest man-made structure in the world.
This image was taken by the French Pleiades satellite.
In this photo, this was taken by Envisat in 2005, you can see Manhattan nearly whited out by light pollution. It is the photo is colorized to show different terrains.
In this photo of the San Francisco Bay Area, you can see San Francisco on the peninsula in the center-left. The Golden Gate Bridge is just barely visible connecting the opening of the bay. The straight diagonal line running down the peninsula is the San Andreas Fault, responsible for the numerous earthquakes in the area.
This photo was taken by American satellite Landsat-7 in January. Landsat's goal is take cloud-free images of the Earth.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider