Best satellite images of 2016: A pale blue dot

Cape Coral is located on the Gulf coast of Florida, across the Caloosahatchee River from Fort Myers. The city was founded in 1957 and developed as a master-planned, pre-platted community.

Jumeirah Village is a development in Dubai with a series of villages connected through open landscaped areas. Although the original development called for over 6,000 townhomes, much of the project remains unfinished.

Galešnjak in Croatia or the ‘Lover’s Island’ is an uninhabited island located in the Pašman channel of the Adriatic Sea.

The Great Blue Hole is a large underwater sinkhole off the coast of Belize. It lies near the center of Lighthouse Reef, a small atoll 62 miles (100 km) off the mainland. It is a world-class destination for recreational scuba divers. The world’s largest natural formation of its kind, the Great Blue Hole is part of the larger Barrier Reef Reserve System and a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Northumberlandia, also known as the ‘Lady of the North’, is a huge land sculpture in the shape of a reclining female figure near Northumberland, England. The sculpture is made of 1.5 million metric tons of earth, it is 112 feet (34 m) high and 1,300 feet (400 m) long. Its creators claim it’s the largest land art of the female form in the world.

Mexico City is the densely populated, high-altitude capital of Mexico. The capital is the largest metropolitan area in the western hemisphere and the largest Spanish-speaking city in the world. The city is constantly sinking and has sunk more than 30 feet
(9 meters) in some areas over the last 100 years.

‘Out of Many, One’ is artist Jorge Rodríguez-Gerada’s first U.S.-based land art. Located in the National Mall in Washington D.C., the portrait was created in October 2014 to represent the many faces and backgrounds of young American men. What makes the piece of art so unique is that it is temporary, destined to be washed away with the elements, or in the case of ‘Out of Many, One,’ it was plowed under and reseeded with grass.

Featuring a total of 392 over-water villas, the AVANI Sepang Goldcoast Resort is located on the Malacca Strait along the coast of Malaysia in Selangor.

This ‘Turbine Interchange’ connects the SR 9A and SR 202 in Jacksonville, Florida. This roadway structure consists of left-turning ramps sweeping around a center interchange, creating a spiral pattern of right-hand traffic.

This satellite image shows a farm terrace in Uruguaiana in southern Brazil. You can see a tractor/harvester on the edge of the terrace.

Palmanova is a town in northeastern Italy. The city was initially started as a fortress built by the Venetian empire in the 16th and 17th centuries to prevent attacks from Austrian and Turkish forces. Palmanova was founded in 1593, but its construction took about a century to complete. Built in a concentric star formation, the town consists of three rings, which were built in stages. The entire town is enclosed in a circular area with a circumference of 4.3 miles (7 km). This is surrounded by a moat, with nine arrow-shaped inter-connected ramparts that protruded out of the town so that the points could defend each other. Entrance to the town is allowed through three guarded gates.

The city of St. Petersburg is located on Florida’s Gulf coast. With an average of 361 days of sunshine each year and a Guinness World Record for logging the most consecutive days of sunshine (768 days), it is nicknamed ‘The Sunshine City.’