There’s a slew of super-large panorama pictures available on the web, but when was the last time you heard about a picture that spans well over half the diameter of Earth?

That’s exactly what NASA’s Landsat Data Continuity Mission captured last month from a whopping 438 miles above the surface of our great blue marble. Measuring in at an impressive 6,000 miles in length and 120 miles wide, the panorama stretches from Northern South Africa to East Russia. NASA calls this work of art ‘The Long Swath’, and it comes in at 19.06 gigapixels.
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Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield has been serving as one of the International Space Station’s resident photographers. Every day he posts beautiful photographs showing what our planet looks like from orbit to his Twitter account, @cmdr_hadfield.

Today the Canadian Space Agency released the video above, in which Hadfield takes the time to explain how to best photograph Earth’s landscape from 400km (~250 miles) above the surface.
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March Madness 2013 came to a thrilling end yesterday with Louisville beating Michigan in the college men’s basketball national championship game. Another (less publicized) tournament selected a winner as well: NASA’s first ever photo tournament. No, it wasn’t a contest in which photographers submit their best image. Instead, Earth 2013 was a tourney that pitted 32 of NASA’s photos of Earth against each other in a March Madness-style tourney.
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Taking a cue from the music industry and those incessant Now That’s What I Call Music! albums, NASA has released its own “best-of” compilation of the most compelling imagery its satellites collected this past year. A mixture of true color, computer models, visualizations, and time-lapses from the ISS, the video gives us yet another stunning view of our little blue planet. Read more…

Seeing as the Voyager-1 spacecraft has been in the news recently, here’s the story of a very special photograph that it took 23 years ago known as “The Pale Blue Dot”.

In 1990, 13 years after Voyager-1 left Earth on its mission to visit two of the gas giants and their moons of our solar system, Jupiter and Saturn, one last command was sent to the spacecraft as suggested by Carl Sagan who was then part of the Voyager-1‘s imaging team. That instruction was to turn back around and take one last photo of our solar system before continuing on its epic journey away from the Sun and the planets.
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Astronaut photographers on the International Space Station have been beaming quite a few photographs of Earth as of late, but have you ever wondered how they manage capture relatively sharp photographs of Earth’s cities at night?

The speed at which the ISS hurtles around our planet is indeed a major challenge for low-light photography, and astronauts in the past have tried to overcome it by using high-speed film or by doing some manual tracking (which is very hit-and-miss). Luckily, space shooters nowadays have a new special tool up their sleeve: the NightPod.
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Photographs captured by astronauts on the International Space Station are in the public domain, so they’re often remixed into gorgeous time-lapse videos. Italian filmmaker Giacomo Sardelli went a step beyond many of the ISS time-lapses we’ve seen by adding in more than just epic music: he included short audio messages recorded by the astronauts who worked in the space station.
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You’ve probably heard of The Blue Marble, an iconic photo of Earth captured in 1972 from 28,000 miles away by astronauts on the Apollo 17 spacecraft. Well, NASA has just released a number of photographs titled “Black Marble.” They offer the same perspective as the iconic photo, except these new images show what our planet looks like at night!
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You know those digital photos you’ve archived by burning onto DVDs and sticking under your bed? You’ll be lucky if the files are still readable by the end of your life. Photographer Trevor Paglen wants to archive photos for a much longer time… and by “much longer”, we mean billions of years. He’s not just doing this for himself, either, but for all of humanity.
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We’re shared a couple of “stacked star trail” time-lapse videos over the past few months (see here and here), but those videos comprised nighttime photographs taken from the ground. Photographer Christoph Malin recently decided to try his hand at the technique, but instead of using his own earthbound photographs, he used NASA photographs shot from the International Space Station. The resulting video, shown above, features the stars drawing trails across the “sky” while the Earth creates light streaks down below.
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