Sure, we've all heard the line "...he sees you when you're sleeping, he knows when you're awake..." in the holiday classic, Santa Claus is Comin' to Town, but has it ever crossed your mind, about the time the visions of sugar plums are dancing in your head, HOW in the heck does St. Nick know when you're awake and see you when you're sleeping?

Capella Space
Capella Space
loading...

Well it turns out the big guy has been, for a long, long time, using technology that is just now coming to the attention of John Q. Public.

There's a new savvy and quite advanced image capturing device that uses some state-of-the-art wizardry known as "synthetic aperture radar" instead of normal cameras. From Capella Space, it's called Capella 2, a satellite capable of taking clear radar images of anything, anywhere in the world, with incredible resolution. It can even see inside some buildings, including spotting airplanes inside hangars — though only in the case of lightweight structures, and not dense ones like high rises or residential homes.

And it can snap a clear picture, day or night, rain or shine. So it can see through clouds . . . see at night . . . and sometimes see through CEILINGS AND WALLS like X-ray vision. But don't worry, this satellite, according to the manufacturer cannot see inside your home. Yet.

There's only one of them up there so far, but they're launching six more next year.

97.1 KXRX logo
Enter your number to get our free mobile app

A former NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory system engineer explained it this way: “It turns out that half of the world is in nighttime, and half of the world, on average, is cloudy. When you combine those two together, about 75 percent of Earth, at any given time, is going to be cloudy, nighttime, or it’s going to be both.”

LOOK: 15 Unconventional Christmas Albums From the Past 50 Years

More From 97.1 KXRX