Aerial wallpapers give your iPhone new windows on the world

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Satellite image showing cleanup in the Gulf of Mexico. (Photo downloaded from aerialwallpapers.tumblr.com)
This satellite image showing cleanup in the Gulf of Mexico will look great on your iPhone 6. Photo: Aerial Wallpapers

If only we could float above the noise, the dirt and the concrete. What we would see is something peaceful and beautiful.

A graphic designer from Brazil is serving up that kind of serene macro view of the world as wallpaper for our smartphones. His Tumblr blog, Aerial Wallpapers, is loaded with a wonderfully curated collection of satellite photography images.

Joao Paulo Bernades looks for colorful, graphic, Creative Commons-licensed images of Earth from NASA and Airbus Defense and Space, then crops and scales them to fit the iPhone 6. The images appear to be scalable for other devices.

The Aerial Wallpapers site allows you to download one or all of more than 70 vertical satellite photos and topographic maps. Bernades gives credit to his sources but no detail on what exactly we are looking at. Only after you download the image does the file name reveal a location. That might be intentional, so the viewer can’t bring baggage to the various windows on the world before downloading.

The images, some of which can be seen in the gallery below, include a harbor dotted with boats; a vascular network of streams and rivers; swirly, wind-blown ridges in the golden Namib Desert; the circular patterns of an oil refinery; and even a footprint of the site of Burning Man.

Those are just some of the massive corners of the world Bernades gives us in 1,242 by 2,208 pixels.

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