Verdant Farmlands of Simsbury, Connecticut

A dark ribbon of river winds across the middle of this satellite image, cutting a lazy path through the farmlands and forests of central Connecticut. The picture was taken on September 15, 2022, by the Operational Land Imager-2 aboard NASA's Landsat 9 satellite, orbiting far above the Earth. It shows the town of Simsbury, part of the Farmington Valley region north of Hartford, its patchwork of greens and browns spread out below.

Simsbury holds a remarkable piece of American history. In the summers of 1944 and 1947, a young Martin Luther King Jr. traveled here from Georgia with other students from Morehouse College to work on a tobacco farm called Meadowood, earning money for his college tuition. Scholars say his time in Connecticut, where he experienced life with far less of the segregation he knew in the South, shaped his outlook and helped set him on the path to becoming a minister and civil rights leader.

The image itself reads almost like an abstract painting, with the deep green of woodlands broken up by the tan and pinkish squares of cleared fields and the pale gray sprawl of towns and roads. Look for the bright blue-black ponds scattered across the landscape, and the way the Connecticut River swells and narrows as it flows east. Satellite photography like this began as a tool for science and mapping, but seen from this height, the everyday geography of a place turns into something worth hanging on a wall.