NASA’s Your Name in Landsat: Spell Your Name with Earth’s Landscapes for Earth Day

NASA has released a playful free tool to celebrate Earth Day: Your Name in Landsat. The idea is simple and surprisingly engaging—enter any word (or your name), and watch it be formed from letters hidden within satellite photos of Earth’s varied landscapes.

To use it, head to NASA’s Your Name in Landsat page, type your word in the box near the top, and press Enter. The page then arranges a row of satellite images where each image contains a natural shape that resembles a letter. Try a test word like “TechRadar,” and you’ll see a sequence of images that stand in for T, E, C, H, T, R, A, R, and D, each drawn from a different landscape feature.

A lighthearted digital toy, it’s a nice way to brighten the day and to reflect on the planet’s diverse terrains. You can share a link to your creation with friends or download the tile set to print later as a postcard or keepsake. Hover over any tile to reveal the exact location it was sourced from, including its longitude and latitude, so curious explorers can look up the spot on maps like Google Maps for a closer look.

An engaging distraction for Earth Day (Image credit: Future)NASA’s new tool aligns with Earth Day, observed annually on April 22 since 1970 to spotlight environmental protection worldwide. The feature showcases a wide range of Earth’s environments and may even spark a touch of activist spirit in users who experiment with it. The Earth Day connection is reinforced by TechRadar’s Sustainability Week 2026 coverage, a series of articles focused on sustainable practices and awareness.

What’s inside the tiles and where they come from NASA describes the images used in the tool as part of Landsat’s extensive, 50-plus-year archive. The tiles are drawn from sources including NASA’s Earth Observatory, NASA Worldview, USGS EarthExplorer, and ESA’s Sentinel Hub. Each image in the sequence can be downloaded individually if you want to keep a personal collection or use them for other projects. Landsat is the longest-running satellite imagery program in the world, operating since 1972.

Notes and limitations The downloaded images aren’t extremely high resolution, so they’re not ideal for large posters. Still, they offer an excellent way to explore the planet’s landscapes and have a little fun while learning about geography and remote sensing.

Follow along for more Earth Day coverage and tech updates If you’d like to stay updated on breaking news, reviews, opinions, and tech deals, consider following TechRadar’s coverage in your preferred feed. This Earth Day feature is part of a broader sustainability initiative designed to highlight practical ways technology and science support a more sustainable world.

About the author Alex Blake has been tinkering with computers since the early 1990s. Beyond TechRadar, he contributes to iMore, Digital Trends, and Creative Bloq, often focusing on Apple and other tech ecosystems while occasionally exploring Windows, peripherals, and mobile apps. When not writing, he enjoys hiking and gaming.

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