NOAA satellites employ a wide swath to capture a large area in one image. Satellites are devices that are sent out into space to orbit the earth and perform many different functions.

Click on the radio buttons to see larger areas of a city as an aircraft takes off and flies higher. Satellites are outside the atmosphere. Now, ACCESSING any or all of those pictures may be another matter, as much of it is restricted. Odenwald says that inspired him to launch the Satellite Streak Watcher project and ask citizen scientists all over the world to take pictures of these satellites with their cellphones.

From left to right and lowest to highest resolution: NOAA/NASA Suomi NPP (375m / pixel), Landsat-8 (15m / pixel) and Worldview-3 (<1 m / pixel). We tend to group satellites either according to the jobs they do or the orbits they follow. You can do a lot with weather satellites, like looking into hurricanes. Even as late as the mid-80s, reconnaissance satellites delivered their pictures back to the Earth using fragile film canisters mounted on parachutes and picked up by planes in mid-air. What do satellites do for us? These machines are launched into space and orbit Earth or another body in space. You can think of a KH satellite as a gigantic orbiting digital camera with an incredibly huge lens on it. Some take pictures of our planet. It depends on what they want an image of. Today they … Today, the Landsat program is not the only one to take satellite images of Earth.

We think of light as visible light, UV, infrared, radio, etc. Some take pictures of other planets, the sun, black holes, dark matter or faraway galaxies. Satellites take satellite pictures of the cloud cover, I don't think any other measurements are taken by satellites. Users can even take “Selfies” and upload their images to the micro-satellites. To take pictures of the whole Earth, you have to be very far away. Man-made satellites are machines made by people. Satellites in orbit regularly photograph the Earth’s surface. Pictures taken during poor weather are likely to be filtered out. Most images of our planet are only a few thousand pixels in diameter; so unless an object is of the order of a kilometer or more (which no object in the vicinity of the planet is), it would only be a fraction of a pixel, and thus invisible in the image.

Still other satellites are used mainly for communications, such as beaming TV signals and phone calls around the world.

These pictures help scientists better understand the solar system and universe. Satellites, camera drones, and other cameras lofted in planes and helicopters all get nadir and oblique images.

Satellites are very far away from the Earth's surface. It depends on the type of satellite, and whether you mean a particular ONE satellite or all of the satellites in aggregate. They see a large part of the Earth in one satellite image. Pretty much continuously! Science Fair Projects - How satellites take pictures. The onboard cameras will capture the image of users Selfies against the background of Space and the Earth and will send the Selfie back to it’s user, creating a truly unique, once in a lifetime message. A satellite is an object in space that orbits or circles around a bigger object. With modern transmission technology the number of pictures (or video) that can be taken, sent or streamed is essentially unlimited. Hurricanes only affect things in the atmosphere. These two things are, however, very closely related, because the job a satellite does usually determines both how far away from Earth it needs to be, how fast it has to move, and the orbit it has to follow. Some take pictures of other planets, the sun and other objects. Commercial and security satellites do the same.

Optical image reconnaissance satellites use a charge coupled device (CCD) to gather images that make up a digital photograph for transmission back to Earth from an altitude of about 200 miles. Take a look at the three images below. Take pictures of the hurricane. While there are many satellites constantly capturing their views of the earth, most do so at low Earth orbit, a distance too close to see the whole earth at one time. There are thousands of man-made satellites.

Note that the pictures of Earth do have satellites in them; however, they’re too tiny to be resolved in the image.

Side by side you can see the effect of the resolution of each of the satellites. The Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) satellite is on its way to do something epic.

NASA’s Landsat series of satellites have consistently orbited and captured images of the Earth since the program launched in 1972.