[celoyd]

Exactly. This is why distant city lights often twinkle even more than stars do: there’s more atmosphere between you and them than between you and the stars.

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.)