Beautiful Satellite Photographs of the Earth, Courtesy of the ESA

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Well, thanks to the US Government shutdown, space photography lovers who frequented site’s like NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day are left looking for other outlets. Thankfully, there are plenty out there, not the least of which is the space imagery archive of the European Space Agency, or ESA.

NASA may be experiencing a 97% workforce cut, but the ESA is still very much up and running, and their Observing the Earth and Space in Images webpages will give you plenty to browse through until Congress gets its act together.

The photos included below are all taken from the Observing the Earth archive, where the ESA uploads a new photo taken by one of the many satellites at their disposal every week. Like our beloved Astronomy Picture of the Day, each photo in the archive is accompanied by some details that explain what you’re looking at.

Here’s a selection of some of what we found while browsing the archive:

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For more images of our beautiful Blue Planet, head over to the ESA’s Observing the Earth archive and browse through one photo per week all the way back to January of 2004. And if you want to see more than just Earth, check out their Space in Images site here.

(via Colossal)

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