Satellites watched as a short lived city sprang up within the Nevada desert, where the famed Burning Man “radical self-expression” festival kicked off on Monday (Aug. 28).
One spacecraft even caught a glimpse of some sort of fireplace burning on the town’s major plaza, even though it wasn’t Burning Man’s major fire, which can close the festival next week.
Satellites of the U.S. Earth-observation company Maxar Technologies took daytime images of the makeshift Black Rock City, showing a circular footprint resembling an ancient Greek amphitheater. In the course of the town is a round plaza surrounded by a series of concentric circles delineating the town’s “streets,” around which cars are parked and tents pitched.
Maxar’s spacecraft took those images on Sunday (Aug. 27), in the future before the official start of the festival, which can run until next Tuesday (Sept. 5).
Related: Burning Man 2019 spotted from space (satellite photos)
The European Earth-observation satellite Sentinel-2 flew over the town on the identical day, catching a glimpse of some kind of fireplace burning in the course of the major plaza. The Burning Man festival is known as after an effigy that’s ceremoniously burned toward the tip of the festival on the night before Labor Day, which this yr falls on Sept. 4. The fireplace caught by the Sentinel-2 satellite subsequently couldn’t be that big fire just yet.
“Sentinel2 seems to indicate some kind of fireplace 😎🔥. Mixture of greyscale visible light and SWIR [short-wave infrared],” an Earth-observation researcher who goes by the moniker kosmi said on X, formerly Twitter, under, in a post on Monday that shared the image.
Burning Man is an annual event held within the Black Rock Desert in Nevada some 120 miles (193 kilometers) north of Reno. The festival celebrates all types of “radical self-expression” and “radical self-reliance,” which could possibly be described as very unusual types of art and communal living. Although tickets cost upward of $575, the event lists decommodification and gifting amongst its major principles.