With a history spanning more than three millennia, Athens bears
remnants of every age, from Classical antiquity through the
twenty-first century. The city’s center, with its treasures of
Greco-Roman architecture, lies east of an industrialized region,
identifiable by the sprawling buildings with broad, flat roofs.
Suburbs surround the city center on all sides. The Advanced Land
Imager (ALI) on NASA’s Earth Observing-1 (EO-1) satellite
captured this true-color image of central Athens on July 2,
2004. Main roads run mostly northeast-southwest through this
part of the city, and side streets divide densely packed
buildings. Standing out from the gray-blue cityscape are several
areas of green: Lycabettus Hill, the National Garden, Syngrou
Park, and the open space around the Acropolis. The tilted U
shape is the Panathenaic Stadium, gleaming white thanks to its
marbled surface. Built in Classical times, it was renovated for
two sets of modern Olympic games, in 1896 and 2004. ALI acquired
this image not long before t