I am more amazed at the lack of smog blocking visibility.
Disclaimer: I'm Chinese and I love Beijing as a city, on a good day it's about as clean as LA and on a bad day its...well you can barely see airport terminal when you land.
Another effect here is that Skybox’s video uses the pan band, which includes infrared to 900 nm[0], and smog is usually pretty transparent in NIR, depending.
0. http://skybox.com/uploads/10/08/imageryandvideospecsheet.pdf
And a third important factor is that smog is very diffuse (by definition: otherwise you call it a smoke plume), so if you have the bit depth you can just increase contrast until you get a good image.
(I work at Mapbox on satellite imagery, but wasn’t involved with this particular blog post; what I’m saying here is stuff that people in remote sensing Just Know.)
http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1347835/security-fear...
Professor Yang Aiping, an expert in digital imaging with the School of Electronic Information Engineering of Tianjin University and leader of the civilian team, said she was facing tremendous pressure because of the enormous technological challenges.
"Most studies in other countries are to do with fog. In China, most people think that fog and smog can be dealt by the same method. Our preliminary research shows that the smog particles are quite different from the small water droplets of fog in terms of optical properties," she said.
"We need to heavily revise, if not completely rewrite, algorithms in some mathematical models. We also need to do lots of computer simulation and extensive field tests."