Landsat 9 caught the tilted rock of Vasquez Rocks

From orbit, Vasquez Rocks look like gray bands between the mountains. NASA Earth Observatory chose them as the Image of the Day for Sept. 8, 2026, and titled the piece “The Otherworldly Geology of Vasquez Rocks.”

Landsat 9 took the picture on July 28 with its Operational Land Imager, a camera that records the ground in several wavelengths of light. NASA posted a pair of views, one in false color and one in natural color, showing brush and sage around Agua Dulce and Vasquez Rocks Natural Area in the Soledad Basin. Michala Garrison made the images from U.S. Geological Survey Landsat data. Adam Voiland wrote the story.

Geologists, NASA says, estimate that the rock layers there tilt about 50 degrees on average, “steep enough that many of the otherworldly formations appear to point toward the stars.”

The page says the rocks have been one of Star Trek’s favorite backdrops “ever since the show’s inaugural season, when Captain James T. Kirk scrambled up the jagged terrain during an iconic battle with a member of a reptilian alien species.”

They did not start that way. NASA says sediment washed down about 25 million years ago onto fan-shaped piles of gravel and sand, then was buried and hardened into sandstone and conglomerate. Later, the grinding of plates along a boundary that includes the San Andreas Fault lifted and bent the Soledad Basin. Weather wore away the softer rock and left the hard fins and ridges.

An editor’s note says today’s story is the answer to the September Puzzler.