West Coast wildfire smoke is visible from outer space

Wednesday, September 16, 2020 - 17:20 in Astronomy & Space

The photo was taken by NASA’s camera EPIC, which takes pictures of the planet every two hour from NOAA’s satellite DSCOVR. You can spot the plume of wildfire smoke off the west coast of the United States. (NASA Earth Observatory images by Lauren Dauphin/)Last week, the San Francisco Bay Area woke up to a saturated-orange sky. The smoke particles from the wildfires raging all over the West Coast since August blocked the blue light from the sun, creating the orange and red-tinted spectacle for our human eyes. But a day before hundreds shared apocalyptical-looking images on social media, a NOAA satellite had already captured the devastating scale of the wildfires.The photo shows a large and dense mass of smoke all over the US' West Coast, all the way down from Oregon to Southern California. NASA’s Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC) camera took the image on September 8th while orbiting...

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