It's space porn time! NASA just released a series of stunning, high-resolution photos of Earth at night taken with a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) satellite. The detail is astounding. You can clearly see the bright yellow veins of civilization wrapping around the planet, converging at population centers. There's also something intoxicating about the crescent that forms on the eastern side of Earth as the sun is rising. The images -- or rather, the technologies behind them -- are useful, too, since the ability to capture images of the entire planet will lead to better data for predicting weather patterns. NASA calls the new nighttime view the "Black Marble."
Taking pictures of the entire Earth is obviously rather difficult, which is why "marble" photos are a bit rare. The Black Marble is obviously derivitive of the very famous image of Earth captured by the astronauts on Apollo 17, the last manned mission to the moon, back on December 7, 1972. Happy almost 40th birthday, Blue Marble photo! You don't look a day over 21.
It was an extraordinary photo at the time, because the timing of the astronauts' return to Earth provided a window when the sun was at their backs and the Earth was fully illuminated. It was also the last time that a human was far away enough away from Earth to take a photograph of the whole thing. Satellites and unmanned spacecraft have taken over that job now.NASA pulled a Star Trek in 2005 and released a series of images that they called "Blue Marble: Next Generation." The new project marked the deployment of the agency's new Earth Observing System, described by NASA as "a coordinated series of polar-orbiting and low inclination satellites for long-term global observations of the land surface, biosphere, solid Earth, atmosphere, and oceans."In other words, they're a bunch of satellites that take a shitload of pictures of Earth, portions of which they combined to create a new high-resolution, cloud-free Blue Marble. It was the first time anyone had seen the entire Earth's surface at once. It's even cooler in gif format, showing the changing of the seasons.
NASA released yet another Blue Marble image earlier this year using a Visible/Infrared Imager Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) instrument. They call it, creatively enough, Blue Marble 2012.
So which historic picture of Earth is the best? Well, that depends on your mood, I guess. The Black Marble really is dark and kind of alien-looking. The new Blue Marble is uncanny, too clear to be real. For my money, I'll take the original cloud-covered Blue Marble any day. The story behind it is cooler, and some old-fashioned piece of me really likes the idea of a human looking through a lense and squeezing the shutter.
Advertisement

