English: This photograph from the International Space Station captures two great lagoons to the north and south of Kaliningrad, Russia. The dark blue features are land. The beige mass at the top and the beige mass in the lower right are the lagoons. The largest mass of beige is the Baltic Sea. From an astronaut’s perspective in low-Earth orbit, land surfaces usually appear brighter than water. But in this image, reflected sunlight, or sunglint, inverts this pattern. The light has a coppery hue, perhaps due to smog particles in the air, which enhance the red part of the spectrum.

The camera settings used to acquire sunlint images result in high contrast, which reveals the fine detail of coastlines and surface features of water bodies, while masking land surface details. The thin, 50 kilometre barge canal leading from the Baltic to Kaliningrad is visible, but the great port of Kaliningrad itself is not. Other human patterns on this intensively developed landscape—such as towns, highways and farm boundaries—are likewise masked.

The area has a long human history. The growth of the Vistula spit finally cut off the north Polish city of Elblag (just beyond the bottom of the image) from the Baltic Sea in the 13th century. To reconnect Elblag with the Baltic Sea, the European Union is considering whether to fund the creation of another canal through the spit at image lower right, despite ecological concerns.