【】Watch Hawaii become a winter wonderland

A brand new satellite orbiting hundreds of miles above Earth's surface has just opened its eyes.。

DigitalGlobe released the first public photo taken by the company's Earth-gazing WorldView-4 satellite, and it's a beauty.。

The new image, taken on Nov. 26 and unveiled last week, shows Tokyo, Japan's Yoyogi National Gymnasium, one of the sites of the 1964 Olympics.。

WorldView-4 is the latest advanced satellite in a fleet of five DigitalGlobe spacecraft designed to beam high-resolution images of various places on Earth back to people on the ground. 。

The details in the new photo are impressive, especially considering that the image was taken from 617 kilometers, or about 383 miles, above the planet. Cars and trucks can be seen on roads and in parking lots, and stretching shadows of soccer players fan out on pitches on the upper-left portion of the photo.
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A close-up of part of the WorldView-4 image.Credit: IMAGE COURTESY © DIGITALGLOBE 2016。

The difference between WorldView-4's first photo and some of the early images taken by DigitalGlobe's Ikonos satellite, which launched in 1999 and took its last photo in 2014, are like night and day.。

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WorldViewWorldView-4's first image.Credit: image courtesy of Digitalglobe。

All in all, WorldView-4 will provide 680,000 square kilometers (a bit less than the size of Texas) of imagery to DigitalGlobe's database every day.。

Clients like Google use those images to create maps, provide help to aid organizations after disasters, and other applications.
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