author : The Times

Many wonderful Landsat photographs of Britain, on scales from a few miles across, to the whole of the country. The thing to notice is how green everything is -- London inside the almost invisible ribbon of the M25 is mainly green except for the centre -- zoom in on that, and more green appears -- and how artificial that green is -- a veritable patchwork of fields. A look at a road map makes the country appear to be all concrete -- but such maps exaggerate the roads precisely because that is what they are displaying. Here we see the roads and towns to their true scale -- hard to see from a distance. The airports are much more visible. (I would have loved the pictures to have been augmented with a night-time shot -- the towns would be much more prominent then!)