A new image from ESA's Sentinel-1A, one of the Copernicus Earth observation satellites. This is Bavaria in southern Germany. Munich is on the right and you can see the river Isar that runs through it. Augsburg is in the center.

I'm particularly taken with the way the cities and villages look like crystals. But this satellite takes radar images, and the white is the radar reflections from buildings. If you look closely, dotted around Munich you can see little circles of white where the forest has been cleared for villages.

The two large lakes to the south were created by the melting of ice-age glaciers. The landscape across this area was shaped by glaciers.