Many images and icons have pop-up messages if you point to them. You can also watch your browser's status bar for tips. Clear water reflects little radiation, so it looks black. Pavement and bare ground reflect a lot of radiation, so they look bright. Urban areas usually look light blue-gray.
Vegetation absorbs visible light but reflects infrared, so it looks red.
This is a customary way to show satellite images. For more details, read the help article on EMR represented by RGB . These Landsat MSS images center on Finney County , in southwestern Kansas . Garden City is centered in the brackets, with Lake McKinney west of town, and the Arkansas River just south of town flowing eastward. From 1972 to 1990 Garden City's population grew from about 15,000 to about 24,000.