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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.

Greenland glaciers

It looks like a new piece of abstract art, but it's glaciers in western Greenland captured by ESA's Sentinel-2A. Satellite imagery is vital to mapping the rapidly changing face of the Arctic.

Photo released 28/07/2015
Copyright: Copernicus Sentinel data (2015)/ESA

At first glance this picture brought to mind pastries. It looked to me like lots of somewhat misshapen croissants. But can you see pastries from space? Probably not. This picture by NASA astronaut Scott Kelly is of The Himalayas. It was taken a few days ago from the International Space Station.

What is this unusual-looking bit of contemporary art?

Actually a photo taken of the Bahamas by an astronaut on the ISS. You can see the tidal channels cutting between small island cays – this image covers 14.24 km (8.9 mi) westward from Great Exuma Island (not pictured). The deepest parts of the channels are the darkest blue.

The caption says, “Thanks to the astronaut’s steady hands in controlling a long lens in weightlessness, this photograph is detailed enough to show a single aircraft and its twin condensation trails.” Can anyone see this? I can't.

But I can see the shadows of clouds on the water, which is rather cool.

NASA astronaut Scott Kelly, recently past the halfway mark of his one-year mission to the International Space Station, photographed the Nile River during a nighttime flyover on Sept. 22, 2015. (Image Credit: NASA)

Red Sea coral reefs off the coast of Saudi Arabia (true color image).

The Red Sea contains some of the world’s warmest and saltiest seawater – that's the result of high levels of evaporation by the hot dry climate. Normally the sea is the intense blue-green that you see here, but algal blooms sometimes form and turn the sea a reddish color when they die off. (Image captured by Sentinel-2A in June of this year)

A note for those interested in geology: The Red Sea lies in a fault separating two blocks of Earth’s crust – the Arabian and African plates. 

What does Scott Kelly have for us now?

On Oct. 12-13, 2015, NASA astronaut Scott Kelly took a series of seventeen photographs from the International Space Station during a single flyover of Australia. The pass was from the south to the northeast over the continent. This was the first photo, so all I can say is that it's somewhere in southern Australia, since although the series of pictures are certainly the #EarthArt Kelly has named them, but they aren't otherwise labeled.

ESA's Proba-V minisatellite was having a look at Africa's highest peak Mt Kilimanjaro. Although it's practically on the equator, it's so high that its summit is covered with snow and ice. This is a false-color image taken in June of this year. As the altitude increases, the vegetation decreases. It's tropical at the bottom, but the light blue at the top represents the summit glacier.

Manicouagan Crater, Quebec, Canada, imaged in March by ESA's Sentinel-1A satellite. It was taken by radar and this is a false color view. The blue tones represent bodies of ice and some water, the yellow and orange tones denote ageing vegetation of different types, mixed with patches of snow and ice.

The crater is 214 million years old, created by an asteroid impact. It's one of the largest impact craters on Earth, the inner ring being 70 km (40 mi) in diameter and the multiple-ring structure about 100 km (60 mi) across.

This image from European satellite Sentinel-2A features Cairo, in Egypt on 13 August.

The capital of Egypt, Cairo is one of the largest cities in Africa. It has existed for over 1000 years on the same spot on the Nile River banks. Located in the northeastern part of the country, Cairo is the passage to the Nile River delta.The river is the cause of the strong contrasts in the image. It delivers the water to transform the desert into a lush garden, where produce such as tomatoes, potatoes, sugar cane, rice and even cotton are grown. The sharp borderline between green fields and the yellow–brown desert is clear. The area is greener on the west side where the flatter terrain is more easily irrigated.

The city of Cairo shows striking contrasts. Along the well-irrigated shoreline, the green reveals the thick vegetation, while the grey areas denote the dense city. The 6th of October City, on the left side of the image, is a new city in the desert. It hosts students from various countries, as well as from Egypt, who study at its private universities. Cairo’s various golf courses are also featured in this image, as well as the international airport, partly visible on the top right.

Copernicus Sentinel data (2015)/ESA