North and Central America. Photo courtesy of NASA.
Whether it came from photographs taken by orbiting satellites or astronauts on the moon, we’ve all seen pictures of our home planet. But never before has it been seen like this.
For its new “Blue Marble” series, NASA reveals what it calls the ‘most detailed true-color images of the entire Earth to date.’ According to the space organization’s website, the images are actually composites of countless other photographs, combined into single frame “mosaics.”
“Using a collection of satellite-based observations, scientists and visualizers stitched together months of observations of the land surface, oceans, sea ice, and clouds into a seamless, true-color mosaic of every square kilometer (.386 square mile) of our planet.”
Taken between June and September of 2001, the images were captured by NASA’s Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer, or MODIS, while orbiting over 400 miles above the Earth’s surface.
To see full resolutions of the images, and to read more about the teamwork and technology used to capture them, visit NASA’s Visible Earth website. After that, make sure to compare them to the original 1972 “Blue Marble” picture taken by the Apollo 17 space crew.