This massive plume of gray-white smoke from the wildfires raging through Southern California's transverse mountain ranges is being pushed over the Pacific Ocean by the notorious Santa Ana winds. A weather satellite operated by NOAA captured this image late Thursday—you can see five of the narrow Channel Islands…

This false-color satellite image of the Mount Merapi volcano in Indonesia was taken yesterday by the ASTER instrument on NASA's Terra satellite. The dark gray area is the volcano's pyroclastic flow. [Image via AP]

After three weeks of catastrophic floods in Pakistan, two million people are homeless and one-fifth of the country is underwater. These satellite photographs, taken a year apart, help show the extent of the disaster—click to see them full-size.

[Clouds cluster at the summit of Papua New Guinea's Manam Volcano as it releases a thin, faint plume, visible to the volcano's Northwest. Pic, by NASA's Earth Observing-1 Satellite, via AP]