The washed out appearance at the upper left of the image is due to sunglint, which is the mirror–like reflection of sunlight off the water.
The polarization characteristics analysis of sunglint provides a theoretical basis for the quantitative remote sensing retrievals which uses sunglint.
The sunglint reveals various features in the Gulf of Mexico, especially sheens of oil that appear as packets of long bright streaks (image right).
Instead, small waves and ripples blur the reflection into a wide, bright strip—the sunglint region.
The increased brightness does not necessarily mean the oil is thicker or more concentrated there; it may simply be that the oil is located in the sunglint region of the image.
One such display—often visible to the ISS crew due to their ability to look outwards at angles between 0 and 90 degrees—is sunglint on the waters of Earth.
The sunglint improves the identification of the oil spill.
In this photograph, light reflecting off the surface of the water—a phenomenon astronauts call sunglint—makes the lake appear to glow.
The sunglint area is a bright strip that runs roughly north-south through satellite pictures of the ocean.
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