MODIS Satellite Gallery
The collection contains over 2,200 satellite images obtained from NASA’s Aqua and Terra satellites overlaid onto Google Earth. These satellite capture excellent natural color imagery in amazing detail from all over the Earth. NASA posts some of the most interesting imagery collected from these satellites several times per week at the MODIS Gallery. NASA also has a MODIS Image of the Day web page, and a RSS Feed if you want to keep up on the daily postings.
The images typically show major events occurring in the world that are visible from space. Dust storms, hurricanes, tropical storms, volcanic eruptions and wildfires are just some of the events captured by the satellites.
One of the shortcomings of the NASA gallery is it lacks a nice user-friendly index for Google Earth. So that’s what I have created for this post. Simply download the KML file from beneath the screenshot and you will get an index sorted by year of all (well…almost all) the MODIS Gallery images from 2003 through 2009. Each image is represented by a placemark and description of the image. Click on the placemark, then click on the blue hyperlink in the pop-up balloon to load the image into Google Earth. Most of the images are around 1 to 5 megabytes, so it might take them a minute or two to load. If you get a Red X, that probably means the image was too large for your computer to download.
About 10% of the images were not indexed by NASA for Google Earth for various reasons (size of image, wrong projection, etc.), which unfortunately includes all imagery near the north and south poles. Also, the quality of the image as you see it in Google Earth might vary depending on how much video memory you have available since these are large JPG files and have not been tiled into SuperOverlays.
I will try to update the index a couple times per year.
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