You may remember the first whole-Earth photograph taken of our planet by the crew of Apollo 17 on December 2, 1972 that gave us humans ours first glimpse of the Earth in its entirety. Things have come along way since then. As it turns out, some of the technologies bringing us photographs of our Earth today aren’t even coming from cameras at all.The above image of our dear planet has gone viral in the past couple weeks, but contrary to circulating opinion, the image is not the most detailed that exists of Earth. As Norman Kuring, the NASA oceanographer behind the image told the LA Times, “I’m surprised that it’s gone viral. I think what’s happening is the general public is seeing a larger image than they are used to seeing, but there have been higher sensing instruments around for a number of years.”What this image, which is stunning in its own right, revealed is that a lot of the instruments being used to capture images of Earth these days aren’t actually cameras. The image is actually coded data collected by a Visible Infrared Imager Radiometer Suite, which is essentially a scanning radioscope that collects visual and infrared measurements coming off the land, oceans, and atmosphere of the Earth. VIIRS, which is currently attached to the satellite Suomi NNP, will eventually collect data that will be used to study cloud formations and changes in ocean temperature. But for the purpose of this image, Kuring developed code that translated incoming data into a visual image. This is a different, data-driven approach to a camera taking multiple high definition shots of the planet from space and stitching them together.Maybe it’s not long then until our snapshots are computed from infrared data and algorithms, but that doesn’t necessarily make this image any less poetic or discouraging towards a good reflective musing on our place in the universe.You can view the image on the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center’s Flickr site. View the image at its original size and get ready to have your mind blown.