Tonight I thought we'd take a look at a few views of Earth from space, but not focusing on the usual suspects, which of course, are clouds. These days, satellites are used for so much more.

Here's a view of a large smoke plume produced by fires burning in the Shenandoah National Park of Virginia two weeks ago. The plume, which appears light blue in this image, is being blown off to the southeast by strong northwest winds.

Here's another image showing a plume, but this time it's an ash plume produced by a volcano on Unimak Island, part of Alaska's Aleutian Island chain. Here the winds are clearly out of the north, blowing the ash south over the Pacific Ocean.

Finally, how about tracking icebergs from space? In this image focusing on the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica, we see four icebergs, numbered B-15, B-16, B-17, and B-18. The largest of these, iceberg B-15, is between 150 and 200 miles long and about 25 miles wide - almost twice the size of the state of Delaware.