Your Name From Orbit
Your name in Landsat — your name written in space, spelled from real satellite imagery of Earth.
Type any name below to see it written across the Earth, free to preview with no sign-up.
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Satellite imagery: NASA / USGS Landsat and ESA Copernicus Sentinel-2.
Your Name in Landsat: Written in Earth, Letter by Letter
In 1972, NASA put a satellite in orbit with one job: photograph every patch of land on Earth, over and over, for as long as it could. Fifty-four years later, it is still doing it. The result is the longest unbroken photograph of our planet in existence, and your name is somewhere inside it.
Each Landsat image captures more than the eye can see. Alongside visible light, the satellites read near-infrared, shortwave-infrared, and thermal wavelengths. A Landsat picture often looks painted in colours that do not quite exist, because it is showing you things our eyes cannot, in colours we can. Plant health. Water depth. Surface temperature. The chemistry of ice.
Cosmic Cycles 3, Earth as Art. NASA Goddard, 2023. Landsat imagery set to an original orchestral score by Henry Dehlinger.
The record it carries
The Aral Sea, almost gone. Once the fourth-largest lake on Earth, the Aral Sea lost roughly 90% of its volume between the 1960s and the 2010s, as cotton irrigation drained the rivers that fed it. The eastern lobe vanished completely in 2014. The water became three times saltier than the ocean, and every fish species died. Read more →
Columbia Glacier, 20 kilometres of ice lost. When British explorers charted Columbia Glacier in 1794, its face touched Heather Island. It stayed there for 186 years. Then, in 1980, it began retreating. Since, the glacier has lost more than 20 kilometres of ice and over half its total volume. Landsat has documented every year. Read more →
Full credits
Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
Producer & Writer: Chris Burns (eMITS). Visualizer: Ross K. Walter (SSAI). Technical support: Aaron E. Lepsch (ADNET Systems, Inc.). Music: “Rise of Chance” by Lester Frances & Mike Fraumeni [ASCAP], ELIAS Music.
Source: NASA Scientific Visualization Studio →
A forest moving north. In February 2026, a NASA study used 224,026 Landsat scenes spanning 1985 to 2020 to prove the world's largest forest, the boreal belt across Russia, Canada and Scandinavia, is shifting poleward. The biome expanded by 12%, carrying 1.1 to 5.9 petagrams of carbon with it. We only know because Landsat has been watching every part of the planet, continuously, since 1972. Read more →
Your name is in there too
A river bend in Bolivia forms an N. A lake in Indonesia becomes an O. A coastline in Norway shapes an S. NASA proved it with a tool called Your Name in Landsat, which works with any combination of A to Z. Skylit Studio took the same 50-year archive and turned it into a framed print, so the letters of your name can hang on a wall. We are not affiliated with NASA. We use the same public-domain Landsat imagery NASA does.
Watch
More Than Just a Picture. NASA Goddard. A 90-second look at why Landsat is calibrated science, not just photography.
A Trip Through Time with Landsat 9. NASA Goddard. A decade-by-decade journey through the programme, with before-and-after imagery of real landscapes.
The mission by the numbers
54 years
Continuous record of Earth's land surface, started 23 July 1972 and still running. The longest unbroken photograph of our planet in existence.
1,500 / day
New scenes added to the archive every single day. Landsats 8 and 9 fly in tandem and map all of Earth's land every 8 days.
30 m x 30 m
The size of every pixel. One pixel is one precisely measured 900 square metre patch of Earth, about the area of a baseball diamond.
$25.6 bn
Estimated value of Landsat data to the U.S. economy in 2023 alone, across agriculture, insurance, disaster response and water management.
Free since 2008
The entire archive was opened to the public in 2008. Before then, individual images cost hundreds of dollars each.
4 wavebands
Visible, near-infrared, shortwave-infrared and thermal. Landsat sees colour, temperature, vegetation health and surface chemistry, all at once.
438 miles up
The altitude Landsat orbits at. Each satellite circles the Earth every 99 minutes, on a near-polar path that sweeps almost every latitude.
9 satellites
Nine Landsat missions have flown since 1972. Landsat 5 set the world record for the longest-operating Earth observation satellite, at 28 years.
Imagery: NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey (Landsat programme, public domain) and the European Space Agency via the Copernicus programme (Sentinel data, Copernicus Open Licence). Skylit Studio is not affiliated with or endorsed by NASA, USGS, ESA or the European Union.