Volcano in red

Mount Merapi is an active volcano in Indonesia. This unusual photo from NASA's Terra satellite uses infrared to map out vegetation, where leaves and other flora are highly reflective. This is colored red in the image, so that's where all the plants are. You can see where recent ash and mud flows have wiped out the plant life on the slopes.

Just outside the field of view of this picture is the city of Yogyakarta, which has a population of 400,000. As you can imagine, satellite tracking of volcanoes like this are critical when major population centers lie so close to them.

Image credit: NASA/GSFC/METI/ERSDAC/JAROS, and the U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team