NASA’s Most Amazing High Definition Image of Earth – Blue Marble 2012
Did you see this gorgeous high res ‘blue marble’ picture that NASA uploaded to their Flickr account?
Blue marble view of earth. Photo: NASA/NOAA/GSFC/Suomi NPP/VIIRS/Norman Kuring
If I didn’t make the effort to do otherwise, I could EASILY devote this entire art blog to the stunning photos that NASA makes publicly and freely available (and which I am so grateful that they do).
Unlike the solar flare picture, I know exactly how this one was created – it’s actually a composite image made from pictures of swathes of the surface of the planet taken by the Visible/Infrared Imager Radiometer Suite (VIIRS). The VIIRS is aboard the satellite Suomi NPP.
You can get an idea for how detailed the image really by looking at the partial image below – it’s taken from the original sized image which is far too big (8,000 x 8,000 px) to fit more than a tiny bit of it on the screen in one go.
See the whole thing on NASA’s Flickr account.
