Satellite Flyover Captures Fascinating Images of Burning Man 2023 From Space

The legendary Burning Man event kicked off this week, and we already have high-quality aerial images of this year's Black Rock City.

Satellites operated by the space technology company Maxar Technologies snapped a number of stunning images during the day to capture Burning Man's size, makeshift roads, vehicles, camps and more one day ahead of its official start, per Space.com.

In addition to Maxar Technologies' images, European Earth-observation satellite Sentinel-2 flew over the Black Rock City metropolis in Nevada on the same day.

A fire was spotted on the main plaza, but it was not the blaze of Burning Man's 75-foot tall icon, which annually occurs on the penultimate night of the event.

The theme for this year's event is "Animalia," an abstract view on the innate linkage between humankind and the animal world.

"This year's Burning Man theme will celebrate the animal world and our place in it—animals real and imagined, mythic and remembered—and explore the curious mental constructs that allow us to believe that imagined animals are real, real animals are imagined, and that somehow, despite all evidence to the contrary, mankind is somehow not part of the animal kingdom," Stuart Mangrum, the director Burning Man Project's Philosophical Center, wrote in The Burning Man Journal at the time of the theme's reveal.

Burning Man 2023 began on August 27th and will run through September 4th, 2023.