Esri News Feed

Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Cool Geo-Pic: Sunglint on the Amazon River, Brazil


_______________________________________

Click here to view full image (2663 kb)


Quick "Cut & Paste" Highlights:
The setting sun glints off the Amazon River and numerous lakes in its floodplain in this astronaut photograph from August 19, 2008. Large areas of sunglint are common in oblique views (shot from an angle, rather than looking straight down from the spacecraft). About 150 kilometers of the sinuous Amazon is shown here; the area is about 1,000 kilometers inland from the Atlantic Ocean. Arrows show the generally eastward direction of flow of the Amazon. One of the great river’s tributaries, the Uatumã River, enters on the north side of the Amazon (top center). A small side channel, or distributary, of the Madeira River (beyond the left edge of the image) enters the view from the left. Tupinambarama Island occupies the swampy wetlands between the Amazon and Madeira rivers.



Credits:
Astronaut photograph ISS017-E-13856 was acquired on August 19, 2008, with a Nikon D2Xs digital camera fitted with a 400 mm lens, and is provided by the ISS Crew Earth Observations experiment and the Image Science & Analysis Laboratory, Johnson Space Center. The image was taken by the Expedition 17 crew. The image in this article has been cropped and enhanced to improve contrast. Lens artifacts have been removed. The International Space Station Program supports the laboratory to help astronauts take pictures of Earth that will be of the greatest value to scientists and the public, and to make those images freely available on the Internet. Additional images taken by astronauts and cosmonauts can be viewed at the NASA/JSC Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth. Caption by M. Justin Wilkinson, NASA-JSC.

No comments: