Earth from Space

Home sweet home… there’s no place like home. The Earth may not be the only planet in the Universe with life on it, but it’s the one we live on, and we’d better start taking better care of it. These two images clearly show the beauty of this place, and our profound impact on this pretty little blue-green gem.

From the Blue Marble site within the Earth Observatory, data from the Terra satellite MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) camera; absolutely THE best daytime image of the earth (234k JPEG):
http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/data/ev116/ev11656_land_shallow_topo_2048.jpg

From the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) Operational Linescan System (OLS), the Earth at night (547k JPEG):
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NewImages/Images/earth_lights_lrg.jpg

NASA’s Earth Observatory http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/ has so many wonderful images it’ll take years to browse through them all. Also on Blue Marble are ultra-high res images of, for example, the daylight image of the earth above – to 1 km resolution! (in two 500MB TIFF files!). Those, if your computer can handle them, would be a great overnight downloads to study with an image magnifier. Another great source of images is the Earth Science Picture of the Day http://epod.usra.edu/ site.