OK, this isn’t so much a post as a statement of fact. The news loves to use the phrase that something “can be seen from space.” In 2018, that really isn’t such a hard threshold to cross. We’ll ignore the capabilities of non-civilian satellites for a moment and ask what can be seen from space from weather satellites. The MODIS instrument on board the Terra satellite has an effective resolution of of somewhere between 250m-1km. GOES-17 can resolve down to 500m. And the grand daddy of resolution, LandSat-8, can resolve images at 30m! Most of these resolutions are sufficient to effectively see most macroscopic terrestrial phenomena. At 30m resolution, LandSat-8 could, theoretically, see a house fire. So, let’s stop using the phrase when referring to objects/occurrences/phenomena that are clearly many, many times larger than these scales.
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