Satellite imagery can help us visualize large-scale events in ways that TV pictures - even those shot from helicopters - cannot.

Here is a satellite view of the smoke from the Florida wildfires, which is easily seen from space. The smoke can have a serious impact on people living downwind who may have asthma or other breathing difficulties. Here's more on the image.

And here is an image developed from radar data gathered from NASA's Shuttle Radar Topography Mission, with an overlay of quake data from the US Geological Survey.

It shows the sharply contrasting topography of the region of China devastated by this week's 7.9 earthquake. The quake was the result of the continuing uplift of the Tibetan plateau - the high country to the west of Chengdu - as the Eurasian continental plate is rammed by the Indian subcontinent in one of the planet's most dramatic manifestations of continental drift. 

The dots represent the main quake (largest circle) and subsequent, smaller aftershocks to the northeast. Read more here.