• Exploring Earth
  • Photography

Derek Pickell

  • Exploring Earth
  • Photography

TOTO

Here’s an image of an underwater landscape, with the shallow Bahama Banks fading away into the massive 2000m (6600ft) deep Tongue of the Ocean (TOTO) trench…

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Tuesday 03.31.20
Posted by Derek Pickell
 

Hubble Data & Galaxy Names

In the 1700s, Charles Messier, a French astronomer, spent countless hours scanning the sky in search for comets. Given the limited optical technology of the time, he occasionally came across blurry objects that appeared similar to comets, yet remained fixed in the sky…

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Sunday 03.29.20
Posted by Derek Pickell
 

Balbina

These unusual islands change in number from 1000 to over 3000 as the rainy season fluctuates water levels around 12m (40 feet)…

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Friday 03.27.20
Posted by Derek Pickell
 

More Lakes Than Land

2019-09-28, Sentinel-2B L1C, script.jpg

It’s thought that the orientation of these parallel thermokarst (thaw) lakes near the shoreline is no coincidence. As winter turns to summer, the upper layers of ice melt, and areas that had particular weight in ice become depressed, allowing water to pool…

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Tuesday 03.24.20
Posted by Derek Pickell
 

Spring

Closer to the California coast, this island has a designated population of two people, yet is California’s largest island (three times the size of Manhattan). The longest sea cave in North America can be found here, along with island foxes…

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Sunday 03.22.20
Posted by Derek Pickell
Comments: 1
 

Looking the Other Direction

The feeling of having access to the data from a 4.7 billion dollar instrument that has produced (with the ongoing help from thousands of scientists and engineers) some of the most groundbreaking and beautiful images of the universe gives me the shivers, and it almost feels like theft getting free access to nearly all of it…

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Saturday 03.21.20
Posted by Derek Pickell
 

Erupting Volcanoes

I might have gone a little overboard with this one. But I love the idea that one can track down satellite imagery to see Earth’s active volcanoes in action, especially when some of these remote or brief eruptions are barely captured on the ground…

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Wednesday 03.18.20
Posted by Derek Pickell
Comments: 1
 

South Pacific, Part 2

London, Paris, Poland, Banana. These are the town names on Kiritimati Atoll in Kiribati…

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Tuesday 03.17.20
Posted by Derek Pickell
Comments: 1
 

South Pacific, Part I

The South Pacific is a truly special place that I got a bit carried away exploring, to the point that I may need several posts to cover things I’ve come across…

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Monday 03.16.20
Posted by Derek Pickell
Comments: 1
 

The Empty Quarter

These depressions are thought to have once been lakes, with hippopotamus fossils, among others, found here. Today, the Empty Quarter contains the largest expanse of sand dunes in the world…

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Sunday 03.15.20
Posted by Derek Pickell
 

Baltic Bloom

If you look really close in the second image, you will see small lines streaking diagonally from the top right. These are boat paths, and if you zoom in enough, you may find a boat to give an idea of the immense scale of this bloom…

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Saturday 03.14.20
Posted by Derek Pickell
 

East Greenland Current (EGC)

Here, the cold East Greenland Current (EGC) sweeps down the coastline, carrying sea ice in beautiful braids such as this. Eventually, a warmer gulf stream current called the Irminger mixes with this flow…

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Thursday 03.12.20
Posted by Derek Pickell
 

Wave Clouds, Tristan da Cunha

Wave clouds arise by a disturbed atmosphere in the form of mountain waves…

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Thursday 03.05.20
Posted by Derek Pickell
 

Lac Manicouagan

Lac Manicouagan, Quebec, Canada. I stitched together a series of false color images from the Sentinel 2 satellite in order to produce this image, captured on August 2019…

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tags: 1
Monday 03.02.20
Posted by Derek Pickell
 
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