San Francisco Bay on a clear day

Back in February, while everyone was watching the Super Bowl, DigitalGlobe’s WorldView-3 satellite took this photo from its vantage point about 800 miles to the West out over the Pacific.

Normally haze would cause such and image to blur out from such a distance but this satellite is special. From the Mapbox blog where I found this remarkable photo.

We don’t often see pictures like this one. The problem is haze: as a camera in space looks toward the horizon, it sees more water vapor, smog, and other stuff in the atmosphere that obscures the Earth. But our friends at DigitalGlobe built WorldView-3 with a sensor suite called CAVIS, which lets it quantify and subtract haze – making atmospheric effects virtually invisible. Only WorldView-3 can see so clearly at this angle.