NASA MODIS Image of the Day: October 22, 2007 – The Carpathian Mountains
This image of Eastern Europe was captured on October 16, 2007 by the MODIS on the Terra satellite.
The most prominent feature in this image is the Carpathian Mountains.
These mountains, of which the Transylvanian Alps form the southern branch, will be forever famous as the home of Vlad “The Impaler”, who was the historical basis of the Dracula myth. These mountains traverse three nations: Poland in the northwest, Ukraine in the center, and Romania in the south. Nestled in between the two ranges is the Transylvanian Basin. Romania is home to the “Paris of the East,” Bucharest, the country’s capital city. Bucharest can be seen as a faint gray spot on the brown plains due south of where the Carpathians and the Transylvanian Mountains meet, about halfway between the mountains and the Bulgarian border. The Adriatic Sea is visible in the southwest. Black lines denote country borders. Other countries visible in the image are Bulgaria (bottom right edge), Serbia and Montenegro (middle lower left), Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Croatia (lower left), Slovenia (lower left corner), Hungary (middle left center with the blue lake called Lake Balaton), Slovakia (top middle, above Hungary), the Czech Republic (upper left edge), and the Ukraine (top right edge).
