103 Stunning Satellite Photos That Will Change How You See Our World

45.904892400°, 13.317671100°. Here’s one of my favorite images from the 'Where We Design' chapter in “Overview”. The town of Palmanova, Italy is recognized by its concentric layout known as a star fort. The rationale for this construction was that an attack on any individual wall could be defended from the two adjacent star points by shooting the enemy from behind. The three rings that surround Palmanova were completed in 1593, 1690, and 1813.

-33.6787655, 151.3160979. Check out this incredible shot of the ocean pool at Mona Vale Beach, located in the suburbs of Sydney, Australia. There are a number of public ocean pools in New South Wales, offering stunning areas to swim, situated on the rocky coast, with waves splashing into the pool.

“Overview” — Valparaíso, Chile is built upon dozens of steep hillsides overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Known as “The Jewel of the Pacific,” the city is the sixth largest in the county and is home to approximately 285,000 residents. To learn more about the book, click here:

53.0066°N 7.1920°E. Bourtange is a village with a population of 430 in the municipality of Vlagtwedde in the Netherlands. The star fort was built in 1593 during the Eighty Years’ War when William I of Orange wanted to control the only road between Germany and the city of Groningen. Bourtange was restored to its mid-18th-century state in 1960 and is currently used as an open-air museum.

26.386332°, – 80.179917°. Residential development is seen in Boca Raton, Florida, USA. Because many cities in the state contain master-planned communities, often built on top of waterways in the latter half of the twentieth century, there are a number of intricate designs that are visible from the Overview perspective. Boca Raton is home to roughly 91,000 residents.

Stunning blue waters surround and pass through the tidal channels of islands in the Bahamas. Small tidal changes on the banks cause water to flow through the narrow channels between the islands, first in one direction and then the other. The darker blue sections of water are the deepest parts of the channels and the surrounding light blue color is more shallow (less than 25 meters / 80 feet). This photo was captured from the International Space Station and is courtesy of NASA

This solar concentrator in Seville, Spain use 2,650 heliostat mirrors to collect and focus the sun’s thermal energy to heat molten salt flowing through a 460-foot tall central tower. The molten salt then circulates from the tower to a storage tank where it is used to produce steam and generate electricity. In total, the facility displaces approximately 30,000 tons of CO2 emissions every year.

24.445187, 54.719998. The Al Falah Housing Project is located in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. The development covers 12.5 million square meters with 4,857 villas as well as mosques, schools, a shopping mall, and a hospital.

Salt and clay pan located on the edge of the Namib Desert in Namibia. These reddish sand dunes of the desert, seen in the top half of this Overview, are among the tallest in the world, with many rising more than 656 feet (200 meters).

30.089890096°, 38.271806556°. Center pivot irrigation is used throughout the Wadi As-Sirhan Basin of Saudi Arabia. Water is mined from depths as great as one kilometer (~3,000 ft), pumped to the surface, and evenly distributed by sprinklers that rotate 360 degrees. Spurred by a government effort to strengthen its agriculture sector, cultivated land in Saudi Arabia grew from 400,000 acres in 1976 to more than 8 million acres by 1993. For a sense of scale, the total area shown in this Overview is approximately forty square miles (32,000 acres).

23°09′32″N 102°44′41″E. Rice paddies, constructed in steps, cover the mountainsides of Yuanyang County, China. Cultivated by the Hani people for the last 1300 years, the slope of the terraces varies from 15 to 75 degrees with some having as many as 3,000 steps. As we’ve been getting a lot of questions recently about prints, I want to mention that this Overview, and many others, can be purchased directly from our website in the Printshop section!

37.714546°, -6.532834°. Fruit trees swirl on the hills of Huelva, Spain. The climate here is ideal for this growth with an average temperature of 17.8° C (64° F) and a relative humidity between 60% and 80%.

32°51'6"S 70°8'16"W. Los Caracoles Pass, or The Snails Pass, is a twisting mountain road located in a remote section of the Andes Mountains on the Chilean side of the border with Argentina. The path climbs to an elevation of 10,419 feet, has no roadside safety barriers, and is frequented by large trucks.

42°4′27″N 87°41′3″W

The Baha'i House of Worship in Wilmette, Illinois, is the oldest surviving Baha'i House of Worship in the world and the only one in the United States. The building contains an auditorium that seats 1,191 people beneath a 138 foot-high (42 m) domed structure. You’ll also notice that many components of the complex come in sets of nine as the number symbolizes perfection and completion in the Baha'i faith.

55 ° 38 ’12.836031 “N, 12 ° 23′ 58.386726″ E

43.077305°N 79.07562°W. Niagara Falls is the collective name for three waterfalls that straddle the border between Ontario, Canada and the United States. Horseshoe Falls is seen here. The falls have the highest flow rate of any waterfall in the world, with a vertical drop of more than 165 feet (50 m). The Maid of the Mist, also visible here, is a boat that has carried passengers into the rapids below the falls since 1846.

33.6189504, -112.291099. Houses, built in concentric circles, make up a section of Sun City, Arizona, USA. When the development opened on January 1, 1960, the event attracted a crowd of more than 100,000 onlookers and the "futuristic development" was featured on the cover of Time magazine.

41.394921°N 2.175507°E. Plaça de Tetuan is a major square located in the Eixample district of Barcelona, Spain. The area characterized by its strict grid pattern, octagonal intersections, and apartments with communal courtyards.

19.420511533°, -99.08808712°. This week we will be looking at fascinating examples of urban planning - a major focus of the Where We Design chapter in our new book “Overview”. To start off, here is one of our favorite shots of the radiating streets that surround the Plaza Del Ejecutivo in Mexico City, Mexico. If you have examples of other cities that you think might look particularly mesmerizing from above, please let us know in the comments on Facebook.

40°47′13″N 119°12′16″W. Over the next few days, thousands of people from around the world will head to the desert in Nevada, USA to construct Black Rock City. Laid out in a grid plan with radiating avenues named after the numbers on a clock, the city serves as home to roughly 60,000 people for Burning Man, an annual week-long event. Burning Man is described as an experiment in community, art, self-expression, and radical self-reliance. Additionally residents in Black Rock City practice one of the event's key principles of ‘Leave No Trace’ – meaning significant efforts are taken to make sure as the city is disassembled in the days following the festival, the desert returns to its original state.