NASA recently released a time-lapse that compresses nine weeks of seasonal change in southwest Virginia into a few hypnotic seconds, and it’s fascinating to watch. From early October to early December, forests that looked full and alive drain into rust, then bare brown, before getting wiped with an early blanket of snow.
The animation pulls from satellite images collected between October 4 and December 6, 2025, using data from NASA’s Landsat missions and the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-2 satellites. Together, those images show the Valley and Ridge province of the Appalachian Mountains cycling from late summer green through fall color and into winter, all without a single camera ever touching the ground…