Van Gogh’s Starry Night? No—Guadalupe’s cloudy seas This image by our Terra satellite shows cloudy seas off the coast of Guadalupe, an island in the eastern Pacific Ocean. Two natural phenomena are on display: the faint bands of color and the series of swirls in the clouds. The faint red bands of light crossing over the center of the image are part of a glory. Glories occur when water droplets scatter sunlight back toward a source of light. The typical appearance of a glory is a ring of light—red on the outside and blue on the inside—but the way our satellite images the Earth captures a glory as two parallel bands of light instead. The spirals in the clouds are called von Kármán vortices. These vortices occur when wind is diverted around a blunt, high-profile obstacle, like an island rising from the ocean. Image description: A bird’s eye view of the sea off the coast of the island Guadalupe. A dense blanket of scattered clouds and mist dominates the image, with a near-vertical line...