Olympian Clouds

[Guest_Jim_*]

Go to Mount Olympus worldwind://goto/world=Earth&lat=40.04739&lon=22.36549&al t=52344
and look at the Landsat NLT Visible, Landsat NLT Pseudo, Geocover 2000, Landsat Visible, and Landsat Pseudo. Look specifically and the clouds, they're in the same place for every satellite image save the Geocover 1990. Does that mean that the Landsat NLT satellite has the ability to take multiple pictures at once, each with different coloring, or that people on Earth alter those images after they’re taken?

[withak]

It's all the same picture originally. The satellites don't take regular pictures though, they record wavelengths of light, from visible wavelengths down to infra-red. How those different bands of wavelengths are interpreted as colors on your screen determine whether you get visible color (where they try to make the pictures look as realistic as possible) or pseudo-color (where they include the infra-red with the visible wavelengths so the infra-red radiation characteristics of the stuff being photographed affect the color on the screen). This is why water is always the same color in the pseudo-color pictures, regardless of whether it is green or brown or blue in the visible color layers. Vegetation will also usually show up as similiar colors and bare rock/soil/pavement will look similiar as well, regardless of their actual visible colors.