earth

Apollo 8 was the first manned mission to leave Earth's orbit, orbit the Moon, and return to Earth. Since it wasn't a moon landing, though, it tends to not be as celebrated as other manned moon missions. But the photo known as Earthrise was captured during this mission on December 24th, 1968, becoming an iconic piece of history. This 6-minute video from Vintage Space explores the question of who the person behind the camera was.

Photographer Kilian Schönberger shot a series of otherworldly photos showing the "earth pyramids" found in the province of South Tyrol in northern Italy. These are unusual and beautiful natural formations caused by erosion.

Aboard NASA’s Aqua satellite, the MODIS captures imagery of the Earth’s water bodies. On May 29, it captured the data used to create this mesmerising image of phytoplankton blooming in the Black Sea.

Nikon Europe released this 3-minute video by SmugMug Films showing a compilation of time-lapse videos of Earth created using still photos shot by Nikon DSLRs onboard the International Space Station.

NASA has just released a new set of composite satellite photos showing what Earth looks like at night. The gorgeous images feature glowing lights across the planet showing where civilization is found.

1 terapixel equals 1 million megapixels, or 1 trillion pixels. And San Francisco-based satellite startup Planet plans to capture 50 of these terapixels each day starting later this year. Specifically, they plan to capture one 50 terapixel image of our entire planet every single day.

NASA has a new high resolution toy in orbit. The GOES-16 weather satellite was launched from Cape Canaveral back in November, and NASA just published the first photos of our Earth taken by this new satellite and its special "Advanced Baseline Imager."

German photographer Christian Schmidt was commissioned last year to shoot a series of photos of the world, from the perspective of Earth itself.

Instead of capturing a night sky time-lapse with the stars spinning overhead, Windston attached a GoPro HERO4 to his star-tracking telescope rig and shot the 1-minute video above that show's Earth's rotation in a different way.

Mercury just passed between the Earth and the Sun yesterday, a rare "planetary transit" that occurs about 13 times every 100 years. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) spacecraft shot highly detailed photos of the astronomical event, and the beautiful time-lapse above is what resulted.

We've seen people do some cool things using NASA's beautiful images of Earth captured from the International Space Station (ISS). But Armand Dijcks' 4K space cinemagraphs might just take the zen-like cake.

We can come to terms with the fact that that astronauts aboard the ISS get a view none of us can access and gear few of us can afford, but do they have to rub our noses in it!? We're joking of course, but the latest vlog from aboard the ISS does have us pretty jealous.

NASA just gave satellite imagery nerds a very big present: along with a bunch of other scientific data, the space agency just made 2.95 million images of Earth changing surface available to the public at no cost.

During the total solar eclipse on March 8th and 9th, NASA had a camera documenting it from a very special perspective -- one that's 1 million miles away.

Here's a beautiful photo of the Earth and Moon in a single frame, captured back on October 3, 2007 by the HiRISE camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Our planet was about 88 million miles away from the camera.

NASA just released an amazing new high-resolution photo of the Earth "rising" above the horizon of the Moon. It was captured by the camera onboard the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter from its orbit around the moon.

Apollo 15 was the 4th NASA mission to land astronauts on the moon. On the way home in early …

Every day, NASA releases a photograph from their collection that allows us to admire the great blue and green planet we call Earth. Recently, the agency released a picture of a group of small island cays in the Bahamas. The most interesting aspect of the photo is not the location, but a little bit of detail that reveals itself when you closely examine the photo.

On July 19th, after NASA astronaut Scott Kelly's 114th day on the International Space Station, Kelly pointed his camera out a window and captured this gorgeous photo that shows the Earth, the Moon, Venus, and Jupiter lined up in a row.

Last month, NASA shared the first full photo of Earth captured with its new DSCOVR camera that's floating 1 million miles away. Today it released another amazing series of shots, with this one showing the moon floating across the face of the Earth. The 20-second video above strings a number of the pictures together.

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.

Since late 2014, Japan's Himawari 8 weather satellite has been in stationary orbit above New Guinea, 22,000 miles out (Earth's average diameter is 7,918 miles). It shoots one photo of Earth every 10 minutes, capturing 144 pictures of our planet over the course of a day.

When combined, the photos form a gorgeous time-lapse video showing the passing of a day on Earth. In the 20-second video above, the Sun's reflection can be seen in the daylight that moves across the surface of the globe.

Photographs captured from the International Space Station have gotten a lot of press in recent years, especially as social networking has helped to share them with a wider audience. Quite a few time-lapses have been made as well using those photos.

Usually those videos are created by video editors who combine all kinds of photos found on space agency websites. The video above is a bit different: it was created with photos captured by a single person: astronaut Alexander Gerst.

The Japan Meteorological Agency launched its latest weather satellite called the Himawari 8 …

Check out this gorgeous short film in which NASA astronaut Don Pettit shares what it was like to photograph Earth from orbit in the International Space Station. During his time aboard the station, Pettit became one of the most prolific astronaut photographers in the history of space exploration -- one time he clogged up data transfers for three days with photos from a 30-minute shoot.

More than 1.4 million photos of Earth have been captured from the International Space Station over the course of 41 expeditions. San Francisco-based developer Callum Prentice wanted a better way to browse the images and the locations they were captured over, so he created a nifty 3D web app called the ISS Photo Viewer.

Check out this amazing photograph of our planet with the Moon hovering in the background. It was published today by China's State Administration of Science, and was captured by the country's Chang'e 5-T1 spacecraft that did a flyby of the moon late last month.

Have you ever noticed how, in every photo of an astronaut using camera gear in the International Space Station, there's pretty much never a tripod or monopod or special mount in sight? They're always just handholding this massive camera with a 400mm lens attached.

So how, then, can they capture incredibly crisp photos of the Earth when they're flying above it at 4.8 miles per second? In the video above, iconic Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield shares the fascinating answer.

Oh the places you'll go... Dr. Seuss may not have written those words to humankind as a whole, but he may as well have. As the ESA and its Rosetta Spacecraft prepare to land, for the first time ever, on a comet, this image serves as an awe-inspiring reminder of the places we've already been.

Namely: An asteroid, the Moon, Mars, Venus, Titan and, of course, our own mother Earth.

Over the past 24 hours, the Earth has been experiencing its autumnal equinox. That is, the length of day and night across the globe was the same due to the sun hitting the earth at just the right angle to align its shade perfectly with the Earth’s spin axis.

And thanks to the photographic work of Russian satellite Elektro-L, we get an awesome (albeit quick) view of this bi-annual occurrence from a pretty spectacular vantage point: space.

Hovering somwhere between 205 and 255 miles above Earth is the International Space Station, currently housing six intrepid explorers that are hurtling through space at roughly 4.8 miles per second.

And one of those individuals is Alexander Gerst, a geophysicist who spends a great deal of his time on the ISS holding a camera and putting it to use taking pictures of our planet.

A Belgian company called SpaceBooth is planning to launch its own little -- and we mean really little -- satellite photo both before 2015. Its mission? To give you the chance to have your photo taken with the Earth, Moon or stars as the backdrop... for free.

It's one thing to visualize different layers of gasses in the Earth's atmosphere and see drawings and models in a book or online... it's another thing entirely to capture it on camera. But of course, that's one of the perks of being an astronaut on the International Space Station, you get to do a whole lot of things that are "another thing entirely."

The photograph above was taken by astronaut Reid Wiseman and uploaded to his Twitter feed early this morning. It's a 3-second exposure, and we know this because he captioned the photo "3 second shutter exposure at night shows how crazy our #atmosphere really is."

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.

Rotating around the earth approximately sixteen times each day, the International Space Station is the venue from which many astronauts have been able to capture incredible photographs of our Earth. Taking it to the next level though is a project from NASA called the High Definition Earth Viewing (HDEV) experiment.