"You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics looks so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, 'Look at that, you son of a bitch.'"
- Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14 astronaut, People magazine, 8 April 1974.
It's amazing how The Verge, CNET and Gizmodo all failed to add any value to this story, they just extracted it from the source site instead and each tossed in some links to their own trash.
I can't source this or anything but I seem to recall someone mentioning that the extra green/purple is actually near infrared that is getting scattered back and interpreted by the camera for scientific purposes.
I'm still fascinated by how completely uninhabited most of the earth looks in the daytime from this distance. I honestly can't see any signs of civilization from a cursory glance at this image. Maybe I could if I knew what to look for; I'm curious what features you could see at 100% view on the full image.
Yes, that is why I specified daytime. I had not seen a full composite image, before, thanks. I find it interesting how uniform the lights look across the planet. I try to simultaneously remember how much we are affecting this planet and how little.
It's a single photo of the entire earth from space. 121 megapixels is good, but it's only 10x the 12 megapixel sensor of my current camera. It's good, but it's not Gigapixel good. However, it is the highest resolution single photo that contains the whole earth in it. You can find better ones that are stitched together, but none that are a single image from a single instance in time.
They haven't adjusted these to be true colours - the article says the rust colour is an artefact from combining images from the infra-red and the other colour cameras.
According to this site http://planet--earth.ca/ (Go to Electro-L Images, then Image Gallery) the full image is too expensive to host and he's providing a torrent soon.
Would be a fun project, perhaps, to chop it up into tiles, host them on amazon s3, and use the CATiledLayer class to build an iOS viewer - or the equivellant in one's platform of choice.
I really want to a real time version of this as a Desktop. There are a million virtual Earths but there's something alluring about the idea of seeing a real time image of the planet.
Great picture - be warned, does not include North America. First thing I wanted to do was see if I can see my house, and from what I can tell, I can't even see my country.
- Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14 astronaut, People magazine, 8 April 1974.