In leu of the fantastic series of images from NASA we posted yesterday regarding Apolo 11′s historic journey to our distant neighbor, the Moon, comes some more photographic gems from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, this time showcasing the artistic beauty of the geographic characteristics of our home planet.
NASA asked the public to vote for the best photographs contained in the 120 image “Earth as Art” collection, images captured by The Landsat satellites which have been recording Earth’s every movement for nearly the last half century. After 14,000 votes were cast, the five images below were selected as the most beautiful, awe-inspiring and artistic views of Earth from space. Take a look:
Captions courtesy of Ellen Gray
5th Place: Lake Eyre Landsat 5 Acquired 8/5/2006
The scary face in this image is actually inundated patches of shallow Lake Eyre (pronounced “air”) in the desert country of northern South Australia. An ephemeral feature of this flat, parched landscape, Lake Eyre is Australia’s largest lake when it’s full. However in the last 150 years, it has filled completely only three times.
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(Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/USGS)
4th Place: Algerian Abstract Landsat 5 Acquired 4/8/1985
What look like pale yellow paint streaks slashing through a mosaic of mottled colors are ridges of wind-blown sand that make up Erg Iguidi, an area of ever-shifting sand dunes extending from Algeria into Mauritania in northwestern Africa. Erg Iguidi is one of several Saharan ergs, or sand seas, where individual dunes often surpass 500 meters (nearly a third of a mile) in both width and height.
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(Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/USGS)
3rd Place: Meandering Mississippi Landsat 7 Acquired 5/28/2003
Small, blocky shapes of towns, fields, and pastures surround the graceful swirls and whorls of the Mississippi River, the largest river system in North America. Countless oxbow lakes and cutoffs accompany the meandering river south of Memphis, Tennessee, on the border between Arkansas and Mississippi.
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(Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/USGS)
2nd Place: Yukon Delta Landsat 7 Acquired 9/22/2002
Countless lakes, sloughs, and ponds are scattered throughout this scene of the Yukon Delta in southwest Alaska. One of the largest river deltas in the world, and protected as part of the Yukon Delta National Wildlife Refuge, the river’s sinuous waterways seem like blood vessels branching out to enclose an organ.
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(Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/USGS)
1st Place: Van Gogh from Space Landsat 7 Acquired 7/13/2005
In the style of Van Gogh’s painting “Starry Night,” massive congregations of greenish phytoplankton swirl in the dark water around Gotland, a Swedish island in the Baltic Sea. Population explosions, or blooms, of phytoplankton, like the one shown here, occur when deep currents bring nutrients up to sunlit surface waters, fueling the growth and reproduction of these tiny plants.
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(Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/USGS)
