Civilization is both astonishing and astonishingly various when viewed from slightly above. Not so far above as to be lost in planetary context, but just high enough to see a fascinating thing whole, entire, intensely peculiar and informative. The glory is in the high-resolution details, in the perpetually surprising god’s-eye perspective, and in the shocking patterns that we arrange things in without even knowing it.

Revel in a host of such images and the understanding that emerges from them with collector/curator Benjamin Grant, author of the book Overview and host of the Instagram project “Daily Overview.”