By John DeFore

Currently being passed around the blogosphere are a set of images that offer a refreshing change of pace for those who think of the Earth’s makeup as dully competing swaths of green, brown and blue. These photos, which offer startling contrasts and modernist geometries, don’t look quite real, and in a way they aren’t: They’re not what the naked eye could observe, but instead are satellite images in which invisible parts of the spectrum are printed in colors we can see.

They’re taken from an exhibition held a few years ago at the Library of Congress that was popular enough that it inspired an online sequel. Both sets of images, scores of them in all, can be found at NASA’s Our Earth as Art home page. Still more are offered in high resolution — along with more prosaic images of U.S. states cropped along their borders — at this U.S. Geological Survey gallery which goes by the sense-pleasing acronym EROS (for Earth Resource Observation and Science).

Taken together, the images are pleasing enough to seduce viewers who wouldn’t dream of viewing something labeled a “geological survey.”

As with NASA’s famous telescopic pictures of distant galaxies, these pretty pictures might be a point of entry for people to pay more attention to environmental news items that would otherwise seem remote. After all, erosion, glacier movement, and drought are the kind of phenomena that give the pictures such fascinating detail.

Happily, these taxpayer-funded beauties are public domain, and NASA welcomes anyone to do with them what they will, so long as they credit pictures thusly: “Image courtesy of USGS National Center for EROS and NASA Landsat Project Science Office.”

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