In LA at least, smog goes to about 5000ft to the inversion layer. Looking vertically through that distance you get much better visibility vs looking horizontally through miles of smog. You can notice the effect looking out a plane window at cruise altitude compared to landing and takeoff.
Exactly. This is why distant city lights often twinkle even more than stars do: there’s more atmosphere between you and them than between you and the stars.
Another effect here is that Skybox’s video uses the pan band, which includes infrared to 900 nm[0], and smog is usually pretty transparent in NIR, depending.
And a third important factor is that smog is very diffuse (by definition: otherwise you call it a smoke plume), so if you have the bit depth you can just increase contrast until you get a good image.
(I work at Mapbox on satellite imagery, but wasn’t involved with this particular blog post; what I’m saying here is stuff that people in remote sensing Just Know.)
