Can you spot the vog? No, that's not a spelling mistake – "vog" really exists, a hybrid of "volcanic" and "smog". You can see a plume of it here, spewing from a volcano on Ambrym Island in Vanuatu, 1800 kilometres north-east of Australia.
Formed when gases from a volcano react with sunlight, oxygen and moisture, the vog in this satellite image is the bluish haze originating on Ambrym close to the bottom left corner of the picture, curling up slightly leftward then turning to cut a swathe horizontally across the centre of the image.
Another remarkable feature of the image, taken on 7 January by NASA's space-based MODIS instrument, is the silvery region running north to south down the centre, crossed at its mid-point by the vog plume. That's the gleam of the sunlight on the ocean surface, which space imaging scientists poetically call "sunglint".
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