The bright lights of London have always drawn wide-eyed, enthusiastic youngsters seeking fame and fortune. But in this image from the European Space Agency, the city shows up with bright radar reflections instead.
The image is created from data gathered by the ESA’s Sentinel-1A satellite on March 4, 2015, using its Interferometric Wide Swath detector. The artificial colour image — London isn’t that colour from the sky, sorry — is created based upon the polarisation of the detected radar reflections. Dense urban areas show up as yellow, while water shows up as a deep dark blue, almost black. [ESA]