Robert Simmon is a Senior Data Visualization Engineer at Planet Labs, a commercial Earth observation company in San Francisco.
[1] Prior to moving in 2014, he was employed as a Senior Program Analyst at Goddard Space Flight Center where he was affiliated with the Climate and Radiation Laboratory and the NASA Earth Observatory.
[3] Due to the nature of the data collection process, a part of Simmon's responsibility would to be conceal any holes left by the satellites imaging.
To accomplish this, areas around missing patches left in the cloud layers required additional touch-ups in Photoshop.
[3] Likewise, elements such as the atmosphere halo could not be collected from the satellite data and thereby had to be generated completely in Photoshop.