In December 1972, NASA's final Apollo mission (Apollo 17) took the iconic “Blue Marble” photo of the whole Earth. Many, including science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, had expected that the sight of Earth from afar would instill the belief that mankind’s future lay in space.
December 7 marked the 50-year anniversary of the Blue Marble photograph. The crew of NASA’s Apollo 17 spacecraft – the last manned mission to the Moon – took a photograph of Earth and changed the way we visualized our planet forever.
European Space Agency astronaut Thomas Pesquet recently published a set of images from the International Space Station of Earth that show only water and clouds, which makes the planet look very different than it is normally seen.
NASA's new Deep Space Climate Observatory Satellite (DSCOVR) has captured its first photo (shown above) of our planet from one million miles away. By comparison, the similar and iconic Blue Marble photo captured by the crew of the Apollo 17 was just 28,000 miles away when that picture was snapped in 1972.
The Japan Meteorological Agency launched its latest weather satellite called the Himawari 8 …
A month ago yesterday, NASA invited everyone on Earth to step outside, snap a “selfie” and share it via social media using #GlobalSelfie as the hashtag. The goal was to create a giant mosaic of the historical “Blue Marble” photograph, using said selfies -- and yesterday, NASA released the final product.
In celebration of Earth Day (that's today), NASA has announced an interesting initiative called #GlobalSelfie Day where they will create a mosaic image of the iconic Blue Marble photo (seen above) by combining photos taken by anybody who wants to participate.
Backlighting can be all moody and subtle, but you can seldom go wrong with full-on, straight-behind illumination. Especially if your subject is the planet on which your family, friends and all of humanity happens to reside.
That's what the trio of Apollo 17 astronauts -- and soon, the whole world -- discovered 41 years and two days ago today. Navigating towards the moon on Dec. 7, 1972, the spacecraft had the sun behind it, providing a rare, fully illuminated view of the Earth.
We've seen 'Blue Marble' photos of Earth before, but this latest NASA photo is different: it's the first photo of its kind shot from above our planet's North Pole. The photo is a composite of images captured by a satellite as it passed over the North Pole 15 times at an altitude of 512 miles.
After NASA published its latest jaw-dropping "Blue Marble" photograph of Earth last month, many of you wondered how "real" the image was. Here's NASA's explanation on how their images are created:
The Suomi NPP satellite is in a polar orbit around Earth at an altitude of 512 miles (about 824 kilometers), but the perspective of the new Eastern hemisphere 'Blue Marble' is from 7,918 miles (about 12,743 kilometers). NASA scientist Norman Kuring managed to 'step back' from Earth to get the big picture by combining data from six different orbits of the Suomi NPP satellite. Or putting it a different way, the satellite flew above this area of Earth six times over an eight hour time period. Norman took those six sets of data and combined them into one image.
So rather than being a composite of multiple images captured from the same perspective, they do in fact map images captured by the satellite onto a 3D sphere.
NASA has released another Blue Marble photograph of Earth. It calls this one the “most amazing, highest resolution image …