From a satellite pass
to a print.

The data is public

Every scene in this archive starts as free, open satellite data. Sentinel-2 is a pair of satellites run by the European Space Agency as part of the Copernicus programme. Landsat 8 and 9 are a joint NASA / USGS mission going back to 1972 — the longest continuous Earth observation record there is. ASTER rides piggyback on NASA's Terra satellite and adds a thermal eye.

All of this data is yours, mine, anyone's — downloadable from Copernicus Browser or USGS EarthExplorer with a free account and a little patience. Orbital Artifacts doesn't own the imagery; the studio owns the framing, the composition, and the print.

Choosing a scene

Not every place photographs well from 700km up.

Scenes get picked the way you'd pick a record to put on: slowly, with reasons. Sometimes it's a river I've read about; sometimes it's the chance alignment of snow and shadow at a specific moment in the year. Often it's a place that reveals something in false-color that you'd never see standing on the ground — the ghost of an old river channel, a plume of glacial meltwater, the exact shape of a pan of salt crystals.

False-color

Satellites see more than we do. Where our eyes register three wavelengths of visible light (red, green, blue), a sensor like Landsat 8 OLI reads nine — from deep blue all the way out through shortwave infrared. The invisible wavelengths are where the interesting information lives: healthy vegetation lights up in near-infrared, water bodies vanish into near-black, iron-rich soils hum in shortwave infrared.

False-color imaging is the trick of taking those invisible wavelengths and mapping them onto the visible spectrum so your eyes can see them. It's not a filter or a stylization — it's a translation. The colors mean something. They're the best possible answer to the question "what would this place look like if your eyes were tuned slightly differently?"

Each scene's band combination is listed on its page. Bands 7-6-4 is shortwave-infrared-2 on red, shortwave-infrared-1 on green, red on blue — a combination that makes geology pop. Bands 4-3-2 is the natural view; Bands 8-4-3 turns plant life scarlet.

Composition

The raw data arrives as individual grayscale TIFFs — one per band, often a gigabyte apiece. The workhorse is SNAP, a free desktop tool from ESA, originally built for scientists and gracefully honest about it.

The process, compressed:

1. Pull the scene from Copernicus or EarthExplorer. Unzip. Stare at the cloud cover forecast.
2. In SNAP, stack the three chosen bands into a single RGB composite.
3. Adjust histograms — a 99% linear stretch usually reveals structure that linear-100% hides under blown highlights.
4. Reproject to a geodetically honest coordinate system. Crop to the frame that tells the story.
5. Export as 16-bit TIFF for print, 8-bit JPEG for screen.

None of this is fast. A single scene can take half a day.

The frame

The last move is the one that turns a scientific composite into an artifact: the frame.

Every print carries its own coordinates — latitude and longitude in degrees, printed in a restrained monospaced font at the lower-right of the mat. A tiny catalogue number sits at the lower-left, same as a gallery label. The idea is simple: this is a real place on a real day, and the frame tells you which one.

No one needs the metadata to enjoy the image. But for the people who do look — who open a map and drop a pin, or who recognize their hometown from the shape of a river bend — that restraint rewards them.

The print

The files are printed on archival matte cotton paper, 320gsm, with pigment inks rated for over a century of light resistance. Available sizes and frame options vary by scene; see each scene's page for what's in stock, or commission one.

Orbital Artifacts ships worldwide from Sri Lanka.