Images

Landsat 8’s first image captured the area where the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains meet in Colorado in March 2013. The natural-color image shows the coniferous forest of the mountains coming down to the dormant plains. Boulder, Colorado, sits in the middle of the image.

Much of this image consists of the Reserva de la Biosfera Pantanos de Centla, a biosphere reserve in southern Mexico that protects wetlands in the area. The water bodies, mangroves, and forests are a sanctuary for a great variety of wildlife.

This image of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula was captured by the Multispectral Scanner (MSS) instrument onboard the Landsat 5 satellite on January 7, 2013.

photograph of landscape and dwellings near Dapaong, northern Togolese Republic

Photograph of a village near Padaong, Togo, from West Africa: Land Use and Land Cover Dynamics, 2016

The Niger River, as seen from Niamby, Niger, photographed after flooding in 2012 by U.S. Geological Survey Scientist G. Gray Tappan as part of his work on West African land cover. Tappan previously photographed the scene in 2004.

The Niger River, as seen from Niamby, Niger, photographed in 2004 by U.S. Geological Survey Scientist G. Gray Tappan as part of his work on West African land cover. Tappan photographed the scene again after a flood in 2012.

The roughly west-east trail of destruction from the April 27, 2011, Tuscaloosa-Birmingham tornado is clearly visible in these Landsat images. This was one of 358 recorded tornadoes during the April 25-28, 2011, tornado outbreak, the most severe in U.S. history.

McKinley is the USGS's flagship supercomputer installed and housed at the EROS Data Center in Sioux Falls, SD. Estimated peak computational performance is expected to be ~660 Tflop/s. 

Learn more here: USGS McKinley Supercomputer

Landsat 5 image of Gascoyne, West Australia. The image was acquired on December 12, 2010.

Learn more about Landsat at www.usgs.gov/landsat

Example of the Landsat 4-5 TM Collection 2 level-1 product. This Landsat 5 image was acquired on October 6, 2010 near Seattle, Washington and is shown as a natural color composite using the red, green, and blue bands (bands 3,2,1).

Example of the Landsat 4-5 TM Collection 2 level-2 science products. Left: Landsat 5 level-2 surface reflectance image. Right: Landsat 5 level-2 surface temperature image. The data was acquired on October 6, 2010 (path 47 row 27).

A scene at the edge of a suburban housing development and farmland in Frederick County, Maryland.

This ASTER image acquired August 11, 2010, shows a massive ice island dominating the center of the image that had broken off of the Petermann Glacier in northwestern Greenland on August 5, 2010. This false-color image of the ice island displays ice in light blue, water as nearly black, and clouds as nearly white.

A study in shades of blue and brown is actually one of the harshest landscapes on Earth. This glimpse of Africa's Sahara Desert, located near where the borders of Mali, Niger, and Algeria converge, is truly a no man's land, a world of sand and rock without roads or settlements.

This abstract in browns and grays from central Algeria shows that some parts of Africa's Sahara Desert contain much more than dunes of wind-blown sand. Barren ridges and fragmented mountains (lower right) border a vast expanse of arid plains etched with a complex system of dry streambeds.

Tin Bider is an ancient and eroded meteor crater on the Tin Rhert Plateau in the Algerian Sahara. Tin Bider is nearly 6 kilometers (3.7 miles) in diameter and was caused by a meteorite impact in this region of northern Africa roughly 70 million years ago. The other streaks near the crater are unrelated to the impact event.

Like a watercolor in which a brushstroke of dark green has bled into a damp spot on the paper, southern Africa's Okavango River spreads across the pale, parched landscape of northern Botswana to become the lush Okavango Delta.

In the American Southwest, transitions from one ecosystem to another can be dramatic and abrupt. This certainly is true in northern Arizona, USA, where the parched Painted Desert, shown here in a palette of purples, adjoins Sitgreaves National Forest (shades of green), a realm of pine woodlands with abundant wildlife.

Landsat 5 image of the Mt. Redoubt area on March 26, 2009 at 1:07 PM AKDT. The false color image shows the large brown ash cloud extending over the Cook Inlet and the western Kenai peninsula (right sid of image). The image also shows a whiter steam and gas plume rising from the summit of Redoubt Volcano (near upper center).

Near the western edge of the Sahara Desert is a feature that resembles a large eye when viewed from space. The Eye of the Sahara, also known as the Richat Structure or Guelb er Richat, is a symmetrical dome of eroded sedimentary and volcanic rock. The outermost rings measure approximately 40 km (25 miles) across.