Blue Marble

So, earlier today I'm perusing the headlines on Drudge, when I see a link he's headlined as "NASA reveals most-detailed images of Earth..." Sucker that I am for NASA imagery, I follow the link to the Daily Mail, a paper out of the UK. Within that article are a couple of stunning pictures of our planet. The key ones are actually composites formed out of several images taken over a period of months, as opposed to a single snapshot. Either way, they are stunning visuals, which I've downsized below.

Neat as the images are, however, I prefer generally to go to the source. This is in part because NASA maintains several versions of the same image at varying resolutions. So I'm searching through the NASA image galleries, and find myself having some trouble finding it - which seems odd, given that the Daily Mail article was just published yesterday. So I searched NASA using a keyword or two from the Daily Mail article - in this case, "blue marble", and discovered somewhat to my surprise that these images actually date back to 2002.


If you follow this link to the Visible Earth gallery at the NASA website, you'll find the exact same images as they were taken and composited by NASA's MODIS satelite (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer).


So, despite feeling a bit let down by the fact that the Daily Mail is touting these images as "new" when in fact they are 8 years old, I still find myself taken in by the visuals. Simply stunning, aren't they? To really appreciate it, go here and here to see larger resolution images.