The earth at night
NASA have been busy recently, planning manned missions to Mars as well as plans to land on an asteroid. Fortunately in between this they still have time to make awesome images such as the one below entitled Black Marble. The title is a reference to the famous 1972 image taken on the Apollo 17 moon landing mission.
Whilst the original was famously taken with a Hasselblad (I’d still really like one) the new version was made from a composite of satellite images. The full set can be seen on the NASA Flickr stream.
This new global view and animation of Earth’s city lights is a composite assembled from data acquired by the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (Suomi NPP) satellite. The data was acquired over nine days in April 2012 and thirteen days in October 2012. It took satellite 312 orbits and 2.5 terabytes of data to get a clear shot of every parcel of Earth’s land surface and islands. This new data was then mapped over existing Blue Marble imagery of Earth to provide a realistic view of the planet.
It’s well worth viewing the full sized images on Flickr which show the staggering levels of detail in the files as per the below 100% crop.
And how about this shot for an even more interesting perspective of the original blue marble shot? Worth poking around the Flickr stream for more examples of this kind of thing.
Via PetaPixel.