Your Name From Orbit: How It Works and FAQs

Your Name From Orbit is a personalised print that spells your name using real satellite photographs of Earth. Each letter in your name is rendered from a place on our planet whose shape, when viewed from space, happens to resemble that letter. A river bend that curves like a C. A coastline that traces an S. A salt flat shaped like an L. The imagery is drawn from NASA's Landsat archive and ESA's Copernicus Sentinel-2 archive, two public space programmes whose photographs of Earth's surface are free for the world to use. The result is a piece of art that is unmistakably yours, made from the real surface of the world you live on.

In a sense, yes. Your name is not written among the stars, it is written across the face of the Earth and photographed from space. Each letter is a real place on our planet, a river bend, a coastline or a salt flat, whose shape resembles that letter when seen from orbit. So your name really is spelled from space, just pointed down at the world rather than out at the galaxy. Some people look for a name from space or a name written in space and find us here under Your Name From Orbit, the two are the same thing.

Yes. Every letter in every print comes from genuine satellite imagery, primarily NASA's Landsat programme (which has been photographing Earth's surface continuously since 1972) and ESA's Copernicus Sentinel-2 programme (which has been adding 10 metre resolution coverage since 2015). Nothing is generated by AI, painted in, or stylised beyond gentle colour balancing. When you see a letter on your print, you are looking at a real place, on a real day, photographed from low Earth orbit by one of the working satellites of either NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey or the European Space Agency.

Each letter of the alphabet has been matched to a real location on Earth whose natural shape resembles that character when viewed from above. The original idea of finding letters in satellite imagery comes from NASA's own "Earth as Art" gallery, which has been catalogued by Landsat scientists for years, and the catalogue has since grown to include shapes found in ESA's Sentinel-2 imagery as well. Skylit Studio's contribution is the customizer that lets you choose a name, preview the composition instantly, and order it framed and printed in the UK. The curation of which place looks like which letter is the work of the people behind those two space programmes, not ours, and we are happy to credit them for it.

Yes. Inside the customizer there is an optional toggle that prints the name of each location and its latitude and longitude as a small caption beneath each letter. It is a quiet, beautiful detail: a row of real places on Earth, spelling out the name of someone you love. Some customers prefer the cleaner look without captions, and the toggle lets you flip between both versions in the preview before you commit.

Your Name From Orbit is available in four backgrounds (Midnight, Cream, Espresso and Bone) and four frame finishes (Black, White, Natural oak and Dark Brown). Sizes run from a desk-friendly A4 up to larger statement formats suitable for living rooms and hallways. Full size and price details, along with the live customizer, sit on the product page itself.

Every print is made to order in the UK. Orders placed before 3pm dispatch the same working day, otherwise next working day. UK delivery is tracked and typically arrives in 2 to 4 working days. International orders usually arrive within 5 to 10 working days, also tracked. Larger framed pieces ship flat in protective packaging, smaller unframed prints ship rolled in a sturdy tube.

Yes. The customizer accepts the letters A to Z, up to twelve in total, and it does not flinch at unusual spellings or double letters. Names like Niamh, Saoirse, Ozioma or Xiulan work exactly the same as Tom or Anna. Hyphens, apostrophes and accented characters are not currently supported, so a double-barrelled name like Mary-Jane would be entered as Maryjane or split into two prints.

It tends to land well with people who find the world genuinely interesting: science teachers, geography enthusiasts, pilots, sailors, hikers, astronomers, anyone who keeps a globe in their study. It is also a thoughtful choice for milestone birthdays where you want a gift with weight behind it, and for anyone whose name almost never appears on the usual spinning racks of personalised mugs and keyrings. Quiet, curious people seem to love it most.

Most personalised name prints use illustrations, fonts or stock graphics. Your Name From Orbit uses real photographs of Earth taken from space, with decades of scientific record sitting behind every letter. The shapes are not designed by a graphic artist; they are landforms that already exist, found by people who spend their working lives looking at our planet from above. The result feels less like a souvenir and more like a small piece of natural history with your name on it.

Two public Earth-observation programmes sit behind the imagery. NASA's Landsat (run jointly with the U.S. Geological Survey) has been photographing Earth's surface continuously since 1972, orbiting the planet roughly 14 times per day and building the longest unbroken visual record of our world that exists anywhere. Its visible bands resolve features down to about 30 metres. ESA's Copernicus Sentinel-2 (Sentinel-2A launched in 2015, Sentinel-2B in 2017) adds a sharper 10 metre visible resolution and, with both satellites working together, revisits every point on Earth roughly every 5 days at the equator. Both archives are free and openly licensed, which is why the catalogue of letter-shaped places can keep growing. For longer reads on each programme, see our What is Landsat page, our What is Sentinel-2 page, and the wider Earth from Orbit overview.

Not necessarily. Most letters have several candidate locations on Earth that fit the shape, so the customizer includes a shuffle feature. Tap it and each letter cycles through its available variants, letting you compose a version of your name that feels right to you. Some customers shuffle until the colours all sit together harmoniously, others until a specific meaningful place appears in their name. Both are correct answers.

NASA's own curators have been quietly collecting striking Landsat images for years and publishing them as the "Earth as Art" series, and ESA has done the same with its Sentinel imagery in collections like "Earth from Space". We have written about the project and how it informs Your Name From Orbit at our Earth as Art page, which is a good next read if this has caught your imagination.