An impressive 3D image of earth taken 36,000 kilometres (22,369 miles) away by a weather satellite is finally proving how significant humans are. The photo is way beyond NASA’s earlier snapshots.
Some media outlets have said the image is much better than NASA’s January high-resolution (8000 x 8000 pixel resolution) image and have since dubbed it “the best photo of Earth ever taken.”
One of the noticeable features include the orange that covers the bottom half of Africa, Australia and parts of Europe and Asia. The Russian weather satellite, which took the photo, uses the image from four wavelengths of light including three visible and one infrared.
Users can play around with the photo using GigaPan and zoom in and out of the image, or click on pre-selected snapshots the planet’s different regions.
They can as well compare the different features of today’s photo and NASA’s from January.
Robert Simmon, a scientist at the NASA Earth Observatory, Goddard Space Flight Center, in an interview with Gizmodo said the snapshots aren’t better or worse, but rather they capture different things.
A video has been published, which is comprised of approximately 350 shots and each one is taken every 30 minutes.
Launched in January 2011 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, Elektro-L No.1, maintains a geostationary orbit, which means it matches the rotation speed of Earth.
It took a snapshot orbiting 36,000 kilometres (22,369 miles) above the equator.
