From a satellite pass
to a print.
Every print in this catalogue passes through five sets of hands before it reaches a wall — a satellite, a sensor, a team of scientists, an editorial studio, a printer’s press. Here is the chain, in order.
What your eyes were missing
Visible light — red, green, blue — is a thin slice of what bounces back from Earth. Shortwave-infrared maps moisture into rock. Thermal infrared registers where the ground is one degree warmer than its neighbour. Near-infrared makes living vegetation glow like a freshly struck match against bare soil.
Every scene in this catalogue began as a recording of light at wavelengths your retina was never built to register. The colour you do see, on the print, is — in the strict sense — a translation.
Material that wrote in invisible ink, transcribed for the wall.
The instruments
The capture happens on machines that took decades to build.
Landsat is a joint NASA / U.S. Geological Survey programme — the longest unbroken record of Earth from orbit, since 1972. Landsat 8 carries the Operational Land Imager, reading nine spectral bands from 705 km above the surface, every 16 days. Sentinel-2 is the European Space Agency’s contribution under the Copernicus programme, covering the planet every five days at 10-metre resolution. ASTER, riding NASA’s Terra satellite, can register a 1 °C temperature difference on the ground.
These satellites cost in the high hundreds of millions of dollars apiece. Every launch is a decade of optical engineering, mission planning, and international diplomacy compressed into a four-minute ride on top of a controlled explosion.
They are the most carefully made cameras in the history of cameras.
The scientists
A raw satellite scene is a stack of greyscale arrays — single-band recordings, each tens of megapixels of unsigned 16-bit integers. Unintelligible without translation.
The translators are the remote-sensing scientists at the USGS Earth Resources Observation and Science Center in South Dakota: a campus of about a thousand specialists who have spent two decades assembling the public-domain Earth as Art series. They choose the band combinations. They stretch the histograms. They compare a hundred candidate frames before publishing one. The plates that make it into Earth as Art passed through their hands first, every time.
The studio doesn’t pretend to have made the imagery. The scientists at EROS made it. What we did is choose.
The studio
Out of hundreds of EROS plates, we choose. We sequence them — OA-001 opens because OA-001 opens; OA-101 closes because nothing else can sit at OA-101. We frame each scene with its own coordinates, sensor, and catalogue number, set in a monospaced typeface the studio specified for this catalogue and nothing else.
Curation is a real practice with a long history. It’s the work of a record label’s A&R, a museum’s acquisitions committee, the editor of a photography monograph: looking at a vast archive and saying this one earns a print, this one comes after it, this one waits. The print on your wall made it through that filter.
That filter has weight because the filter is small. The catalogue is 101 prints, fixed.
The print
Files print on archival matte cotton paper at 320 gsm — the weight of a museum mat, with the same century-rated lightfastness. Pigment ink, never dye. Each print signed and numbered against an edition between 8 and 32 prints, never a multiple of nine, picked deterministically per scene. (The number isn’t a marketing flourish; it’s the rule the studio set itself, and it doesn’t move.)
Once an edition is sold, the studio doesn’t restock. There is no open-edition tier, no second run, no anniversary reprint. The number on the back of the print is the number that exists.
Fulfilment is print-on-demand through Printify or Gelato; the studio chooses the provider per scene based on which renders the specific palette best, and the print ships from whichever facility is nearest the buyer — which keeps shipping fast and the carbon honest.
What you’re paying for
A satellite. A multispectral instrument designed and calibrated for this work over two decades. The team at the USGS EROS Center who turned its output into a colour plate. Two decades of public-domain Earth observation, released as a gift to anyone willing to use it well. The studio’s selection, sequencing, frame, and typography. Archival cotton paper. Pigment ink. An edition with a hard ceiling and no exceptions.
You can find a satellite poster on every fast-furniture site for fifteen dollars. You can also find a screen-printed Andy Warhol for five. There’s a reason both numbers exist.
What you’re paying for is everything in the chain above this sentence.
A note on what comes next
Originally-processed scenes — built in the studio from raw Landsat or Sentinel data, rather than curated from EROS’s Earth as Art — are planned but not yet on this catalogue. When they ship, they will carry their own band choices and a separate processing note. Until then, every print in this catalogue is a curated edit of work that already belongs to the public, framed by the studio for the wall.
Get in touch for commissions or to ask about a specific scene. Orbital Artifacts ships worldwide.