Season’s Greetings from Space

Copernicus invites you to celebrate the End of Year holidays with stunning images of Europe from space. Discover satellite images taken by Copernicus with their exact locations provided by Galileo, the two EU’s flagship space systems.

Image of the Day: Holidays Edition

Satellite images from different places on the planet Earth are published every day on the Copernicus website. You can either follow the updates on a special page on the Copernicus website or subscribe to the daily email newsletter.

And this month you can get access to a special end-of-the-year countdown. Follow the EU SPACE link to unlock a new image every day from the 1 st of December to the 1 st of January 2023: https://www.euspace-programme.eu/end-of-year-countdown#/en

The virtual calendar is available in English, Dutch, French and German.

End-of-the-year Countdown with Satellite Images 

In the New Year’s countdown from Copernicus, some pictures are already revealed.

This image, acquired by one of the Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellites on 25 November 2022, shows the city of Dubrovnik, in Croatia. An ancient city founded in the 7th century, Dubrovnik has historically been an important trade centre, famous for its port, medieval fortifications, and stunning old town. Today the city is one of the most popular Mediterranean tourist destinations and a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

This image, acquired by a Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellite on 3 March 2022, shows the German shores of the Wadden Sea, a foreshore that lies in the southeastern part of the North Sea, shared between Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands.

The Wadden Sea is famous for its high biodiversity, the presence of vast wetlands and mud lands, and the regular flooding of the coast. A UNESCO World Heritage Site, the area is one of the most human-altered habitats on the planet because of the numerous dikes which have been built.

This image, acquired by a Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellite on 13 March 2022, shows Lake Balaton, the largest lake in Hungary and Central Europe. Because of the Mediterranean-like climate on its shores and its stunningly clear fresh water, Balaton has become a popular tourist destination. The cool temperature and a favourable terroir have resulted in the shores of Lake Balaton becoming a renowned wine-making area.

Etna is the most active stratovolcano on the planet and one of the highest mountains in Italy, and the highest volcano in Europe, with a height of 3,357 metres. Thanks to the diversity of its ecosystems and its beautiful snowy landscapes contrasting with volcanic areas, Etna is a unique environment protected as a UNESCO World Heritage site. This image was acquired by a Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellite on 23 February 2021, when an eruption was ongoing.

Iceland is home to 269 named glaciers, under various shapes and sizes of almost all types: ice caps, outlet glaciers, mountain glaciers, alpine, piedmont and cirque glaciers, ice streams, etc. Ice caps are the largest among these and are found in central and southern Iceland. The largest ice cap in the country, Vatnajökull, covers an area of around 7,900 km2, about three times the size of Luxembourg. One of the Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellites captured this image above Iceland on 14 August 2020.

This Copernicus Sentinel-2 image acquired on 2 January 2022 shows Gozo, one of the islands of the Maltese archipelago. The area is famous for its rural hiking trails, its beaches and scuba diving sites, and for the remains of the Neolithic temples of Ġgantija, amongst the world’s oldest free-standing structures, which are even older than the Pyramids of Gizeh in Egypt.

Discover more satellite images day by day here.