NASA has released a video of Hurricane Bill today from the GOES-14 satellite. The video was put together from a series of still frames taken by the satellite using both infrared and visible imagery and provides different views of Hurricane Bill on August 20.

Earlier this summer, NASA launched the latest Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite, GOES-O. Recently operations have been turned over to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the satellite was renamed GOES-14. The satellite is still being tested in orbit, and it captured video of Hurricane Bill on August 20, while it was on its way to Bermuda.

The spectacular video is a collection of a few quick movies put together by the GOES-14 team from the NASA GOES Project at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

The video includes an impressive zoom-out, showing how big the hurricane is, relative to the hemisphere. Bill is a large hurricane, more than 1,200 kilometers (746 miles) across, and the storm’s partially cloud-filled eye is nearly 50 kilometers (31 miles) wide.

On August 20, the date of the movie, Hurricane Bill had sustained winds of 135 mph, making it a powerful Category 4 storm. At that time hurricane-force winds extended outward up to 80 miles from the center. On August 21, Bill’s sustained winds were near 110 mph and hurricane force winds extended up to 115 miles.

Super Typhoon Choi-wan had just become a monstrous Category 4 super typhoon on the morning of September 15, 2009, when the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite captured this photo-like image. Choi-wan is a perfect circle with bands of clouds pin-wheeling around the dense center. The dark blue surface of the Pacific Ocean is visible through the clear eye, which is defined by a towering wall of clouds.

At the time the image was taken, Choi-wan had sustained winds estimated at 230 kilometers per hour (145 miles per hour or 125 knots), according to the Joint Typhoon Warning Center. Choi-wan was strengthening. Twenty-four hours later, the storm reached Category 5 status with sustained winds of 260 km/hr (160 mph or 140 knots). The Joint Typhoon Warning Center expected the storm to intensify a little more.

While the storm raked across the Northern Mariana Islands and was targeting the small islands of Iwo To and Chinchi Jima, it was not forecast to hit any major land mass. In this image, Super Typhoon Choi-wan is centered over the northern arc of the Mariana Islands in the western Pacific Ocean, with the larger islands of Guam, Saipan, and Tinian located on the southern edge of the storm. The islands north of Saipan are volcanic and are either unoccupied or sparsely populated.

The large image provided above is at MODIS’ maximum resolution of 250 meters per pixel. The MODIS Rapid Response System provides the image in additional resolutions.