The latest addition to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's fleet of weather satellites was launched late last month from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

Named NOAA-17, the satellite is a "polar-orbiter" - that is, its orbit takes it over the North and South Poles while the earth rotates below, so the satellite observes the earth essentially in north-south swaths several hundred miles wide. Here's the first image taken by NOAA-17 the day after it was launched. In this color-enhanced image, the bright blue on the middle left is the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea, while the smudges over the water are actually clouds.

But NOAA-17 can do much more than observe clouds. Even though the satellite orbits several hundred miles above the atmosphere, its instruments can actually measure the temperature and moisture at various levels in the atmosphere below. This remote sensing capability is a huge advance given the current standard way of getting this information - launching ground-based balloons.