Since its launch in February 2013, Landsat 8 has collected about 400 scenes of the Earth’s surface per day. Each of these scenes covers an area of about 185 by 185 kilometers (115 by 115 miles)—34,200 square km (13,200 square miles)—for a total of 13,690,000 square km (5,290,000 square miles) per day. An area about 40% larger than the united states. Every day.
Although it’s possible to process all that data automatically, it’s best to process each scene individually to bring out the detail in a specific region. Believe it or not, this doesn’t require any tools more specialized than Photoshop (or any other image editing program that supports 16-bit TIFF images, along with curve and level adjustments).
