Last week, NASA released its 2012 version of the famous “Blue Marble” image. By using a planet-pointing satellite, Suomi NPP, the space agency created an extremely high-resolution photograph of our watery world.
The photo centered on the western hemisphere, highlighting North and Central America. It went viral and got even more hits on Flickr than the iconic “Situation Room” photo, taken at the time of the assassination of Osama bin Laden.
Now, responding to public demand, the agency has created a companion image: this time focusing its lens toward the East and showing Africa, Saudi Arabia and India.
The Suomi NPP satellite hugs the Earth too closely to get this kind of image in one shot. It’s in a polar orbit with an altitude of 824 kilometers, but the perspective of the Eastern hemisphere Blue Marble is from 12,743 kilometers away.
As such, Nasa Goddard oceanographer Norman Kuring used images from six different orbits of the satellite over an eight-hour time period on Jan. 23, then stitched the photos together to achieve the final composite.
Both of the 2012 Blue Marble images are taken by a new instrument aboard Suomi NPP called the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS). As for those four vertical lines: That’s the reflection of sunlight off the ocean, or “glint,” that VIIRS captured as it orbited the globe.
Other famous photos of Earth include the original Blue Marble, which was taken on Dec. 7, 1972, by the crew of the Apollo 17 spacecraft. There’s also the equally famous 2002 one, which you might recognize as the default lock screen on the first iPhone. Plus “You Are Here,” an arresting photo of Earth from the surface of Mars, snapped by the Spirit rover in 2004.
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