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NASA makes new aerial images of Africa available to the public

CNN  — 

On the ground in Cairo you might get distracted by the papyrus sellers or a view of the pyramids, but from above the city looks totally different.

Something we can now see for ourselves thanks to a public image, video and audio online library launched by NASA that features over 140,000 items from all over this planet, and beyond.

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This radar image from 1999 shows the Atlas mountains and parts of Morocco.

The material in the database comes from NASA’s recent and historic missions, along with captions that allow the public to understand the pieces in their original context, including dates, locations and in some cases, camera information such as which lens was used.

Related: Portraits of Africa, taken from the sky

NASA is encouraging the public to make use of this resource for their own storytelling by allowing downloads, making images easy to embed and adding caption files for videos.

This article was originally published in December 2017.