Every year since 1972 NASA has released a photo of Earth taken from space called "Blue Marble". For this years edition NASA decided to raise the bar a little. They used a new satellite that was launched into orbit on October 28th, 2011. The satellite, named Suomi NPP, captured numerous photos of Earth taken this January 4th for use in a composite photo. The resulting image is a 64 Megapixel masterpiece that trumps any previous "Blue Marble" photo in resolution. Below is the image along with a link to the much larger sized version on Flickr.
Flickr High Resolution Version: Here
Viva Mexico! ;)
Love to see a night version of the same shot.
Looks very nice but they must do better. They did in 2004 with this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Earthlights_dmsp.jpg in the same period they released an 43200x21600 (0.9 gigapixels) image composed of 2 TIF images east (400mb) and west (240mb). I would expect at least a 10 gigapixels image in 2012.
man that water around Grand Cayman is calling my name!
I fallowed the link to the largest photo in the series and zoomed in on my state. This quote from Carl Sagan went through my mind:
"We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look
at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it,
everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out
their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of
confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and
forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of
civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every
hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer,
every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar,
every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our
species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam."
I am that speck of dust. Humbling.
si!! México!!