PhotoBlog - landsat

Dec

2010

3:40pm, EST

Holiday calendar: Wild West Africa

NASA

Silt washes into the Atlantic Ocean from rivers in Guinea-Bissau, a small country in West Africa, in this false-color composite image from the Landsat 7 satellite.

By John Roach, Contributing Writer, NBC News

You're excused if this picture triggers a flashback to a trippy "Space" jam at a Grateful Dead show, but chill out: It's just an image of Guinea-Bissau, a small country in West Africa, made by the Landsat 7 satellite as it peered down at Earth from its 438-mile-high orbit.

The patterns in the country's shallow coastal waters are created by silt that's been carried by the Geba River and other streams into the Atlantic Ocean. However, this isn't what the country looks like to the naked eye in outer space. Instead, the color-coded image was produced using infrared, red, and blue filters to bring out details in the silt. This online tutorial explains more about the trippy color scheme.

Click through this year's "Earth as Art" slideshow for more out-of-this-world Earth imagery.

This picture of Guinea-Bissau serves as one of the final visual treats in our Cosmic Log Space Advent Calendar. For additional views of Earth from space, check out these past offerings. We've also included links to other online Advent calendars that have been serving up space images daily since the beginning of the month:

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by hitting the "like" button on the Cosmic Log Facebook page or following msnbc.com's science editor, Alan Boyle, on Twitter (@b0yle).

Holiday calendar: Dazzling delta

By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News

This picture may look like a delicate ocean coral ... or a microscopic view of a stained tissue sample ... or a visualization of someone's psychedelic dream. But it's actually an image of Russia's Lena River delta, captured in the year 2000 by the Landsat 7 satellite. The colors don't reflect what you would actually see if you were looking down from Landsat's 438-mile-high orbit; rather, they represent different types of surface composition, ranging from vegetation-covered terrain to bare ground and bodies of water. This online tutorial explains the seemingly crazy color scheme.

The Lena River is about 2,800 miles (4,400 kilometers) long, making it one of the largest rivers in the world. The Lena Delta Reserve is the most extensive protected wilderness area in Russia, providing an important refuge and breeding grounds for many species of Siberian wildlife.

This picture of the Lena Delta is the fifth treat in our Cosmic Log Space Advent Calendar. Every day from now until Christmas, a fresh image of Earth as seen from space will be posted to Cosmic Log and Photoblog. But you don't have to wait until tomorrow to sample some more Landsat goodness: Go ahead and feast your eyes on this year's "Earth as Art" slideshow.

Here are more space images, from our own Advent calendar as well as others on the Web:

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter.