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This is a fabulous archive of some truly beautiful images of earth systems.  This image of Rio Bermejo in Paraguay was described as "the river that looks like a signature."

The immense popularity and beauty of Aerial photography urge us to create exciting and inspiring post on Aerial photography. Therefore in this post, we are sharing a collection of 55 exceptional aerial photos that will surely inspire you.

55 Beautiful images that all tell a story...this one displays the Athabasca Oil Sands. 

The USGS is celebrating 40 years of the LANDSAT

Program by having a competition to select the top 5 "Earth as Art" images from the more than 120 scenes from their curated collection.  All readers can select 5 images on the USGS website and the poll closes on July 6, 2012 (The image above is from Coahuila, Mexico).

NASA's Visible Earth catalog of NASA images and animations of our home planet...

This classic image is full of classroom applications.  The first impulse of most students is to note that this image will show us where people live, where the cities are or some other comment that speaks to the magnitude of the population in the white areas.  Let them analyze this for more time, and they'll notice that population isn't the whole story of this image.  A place like India shines, but less brightly than the eastern part of the United States.  I like to point out that South Korea appears to be an island (because North Korea is literally blacked out).  Politics, development, affluence and population information are all embedded in this image.  As with all maps, the more information you have about the place in question (in this case, Earth), the more meaningful information you can extract out of the map. 

Tags: remote sensing, worldwide, consumption, poverty, population, spatial, political, regions.

I'm a huge fan of Yann Arthus-Bertrand's artistic aerial photography.  This image of Rio de Janeiro and the favela is a striking one. I am also posting this to show the how easy the website justpaste.it is to use.  Students with no website creation training can produce sharable materials online.  Now this isn't the most professional outlet, but I envision some middle school or high school students producing a class project that can be transformed into something that reaches a bigger audience as it is shared with a broader community. 

Tags: remote sensing, images, art, worldwide, K12, edtech.

This is an old gallery, but included are stunning images that all teach geography in an incredibly vivid fashion for our visual learners.  More of Yann Arthus-Bertrand's work is also available at: http://www.yannarthusbertrand.org/

View Homes across the world seen from up high pictures on Yahoo!. See Homes across the world seen from up high photos and find more pictures in our photo galleries.

This aerial photography gallery shows distinct types of urbanism and is a good portal to introduce a class to suburban landscapes. 

NASA has released a new Blue Marble image, showing the United States of America. According to them, it's the "most amazing, highest resolution image of Earth ever." Blue Marble 2012 bests the 2010 edition and the original one.

Beautiful image...follow the link for a video of the image at a variety of scales as well as the specs and production that went into it.   There is an 8000 x 8000 pixel version as well as many lower resolution versions. 

The best thing about the space program is all the satellite imagery we receive to better understand our home planet. 

Earlier I have posted the classic image of "Earth Lights at Night," and discussed the classroom uses of the image.  This cartogram helps take that analysis one step further.  This cartogram helps students to visualize the magnitude of population (with the cartogram adjusting area for population) and then to see the patterns of energy use, global consumption and urbanization with in a new light. 

Tags: remote sensing, worldwide, consumption, poverty, population, spatial, political, regions.

The Hubble Space Telescope has produced one of its most extraordinary views of the Universe to date.

The Earth is an amazing place to study...but this makes it feel remarkably small. 

Tags: geospatial, space, remote sensing, scale, perspective.