Orbital View: Oodles of Orange
We’ve seen some cool blues and purples; Now, British astronaut Tim Peake adds some warmer tones to our color palette:
It’s unclear what exactly these orange puffs are, but one commenter points to this spot in Algeria. If that’s right, that would put them just outside Hassi Messaoud, a town in the Ouargla Province. Do you have clue what, specifically, these features might be? Let us know.
More colors to come.
Update: Stephen Morris, a professor of geophysics at the University of Toronto, writes in:
I believe the puffy orange things are sand dunes. Lines of them. The orange is the color of the sand.
I do not know where in Africa they are, but there are similar lines of "barchan" dunes on the Arabian peninsula:
21°35'27.99"N 54°20'19.96"EThe lines of dunes form perpendicular to the direction of the prevailing winds.
(See all Orbital Views here)