Local Date

16 May 2024

Local Time

11:34

Location

Hackney Downs, London

Country or Territory

United Kingdom

Name

Sasha Engelmann

Satellite

NOAA-18

Radio Callsign

M6IOR

Archive ID

ow377

Though the sky was bright, a light speckling of rain fell as I walked to the park. A crowd of people was spilling outside the Open Doors Baptist Church. The attire was mostly black, however, so I wondered if there was a funeral or memorial service. I took cover under the canopy of a sycamore tree. In the distance, I could hear the human companion of Muffin Man (a small black terrier) explaining to two women what I was doing. They were pointing in my direction and I caught phrases like "she works for..." and "I see her...". As they were deep in the shadow of the grove of trees and I was on the edge of the shade I felt like I was on display in a lightbox, silently going through motions. They didn't approach. The satellite passed to the East and a large part of the Mediterranean appeared on my screen. I assumed there was sun-glint when I saw some blurriness over the ocean, but later realised there were wisps of dust. Using EumetView and the Dust RGB algorithm I confirmed the dust, which appears in a soft cloud of magenta-pink over Northern Africa, Sicily and the seawater in between. I thought of Aya Nassar's words about dust as an 'unravelling traveller' (2021: 458) and wondered how the dust was moving, circling, shifting in its passage. Through the tools of remote sensing and the algorithms used to 'enhance' what is sensed, the dust felt like another curious moving entity, silently on display.

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