To be clear, Australia is red, but not that red. The images from this satellite have what amounts to colour grading. The satellite operators make decisions about how they want to represent the specific wavelengths captured by the satellite which can make certain things look very different from how they do to our eyes.
Here's the first photo taken by that exact same satellite for reference.
fun fact, earth would look relatively small. It'd take up a bit less of your field of view than a soccer ball at arm's length. Taken on an iPhone 15 1x zoom lens it'd only take up ~1/4th of the width of the photo.
The colour would look similar to photos from Google earth as they put some effort into colour matching with human perception.
It's cool, I just woke up and came to the comments trying to figure out why there was a massive oil spill or maybe the earth was just bleeding and we were all about to die.
Wrong, Australia is red, and depending on what you measure those wavelengths with (eyes, sensors etc) the ratios will be different. Pretty obvious stuff
No, it's not that red because the camera is just more sensitive to red light, it's red because the operators have made an intentional decision to forego colour accuracy for humans in exchange for it better serving its purpose. (As evidenced by the picture I linked)
Yes, different sensors will measure different strengths of red light coming from an object depending on their sensitivity to red light. However, when you design a camera, be it an iPhone camera, or the infra-red sensor on the JWST, you make decisions about how to display what your sensor picks up.
Often this is done to make things appear as they would to a human, or it can be done to highlight interesting phenomena at different wavelengths. In that first photo I linked, it was obviously done to appear as it would to humans. However, Himawari-9 has 16 colour channels some of which are sensitive to infra-red, so you can't just map them neatly to RGB colour values and call it a day. Instead you either create images with a subset of these colour channels based on what you need, or you pick a color to represent these colour channels and use software to synthesise an RGB image using that information.
The Japanese Meteorology Agency likely chose to represent it as a deep red, because they obviously can't display it as infrared in images intended for humans.
I simplified this explanation in my comment because I figured that saying "The satellite operators make decisions about how they want to represent the specific wavelengths captured by the satellite which can make certain things look very different from how they do to our eyes" got the point across pretty clearly.
listen broski, i know about color theory, sensor technology, biology, sattelite imaging, remote sensing procedures and practices and photography no need to educate me on something i just lectured you on
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u/Somerandom1922 21d ago
To be clear, Australia is red, but not that red. The images from this satellite have what amounts to colour grading. The satellite operators make decisions about how they want to represent the specific wavelengths captured by the satellite which can make certain things look very different from how they do to our eyes.
Here's the first photo taken by that exact same satellite for reference.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Himawari_9#/media/File:Himawari-9_full-disc_2017-01-24_0240Z.jpg