It was taken by the crew of the apollo 17 spacecraft on its way to the moon and is one of the most reproduced images in history.
Blue marble basemap imagery.
Ok so what is this basemap made of.
Clicking near the edge of the picture moves the focus into the respective direction clicking on its center zooms in and back out thus switching between 4 and 0 5 gigapixel.
It is a set of cloud free image mosaics from nasa s blue marble.
This spectacular blue marble image is the most detailed true color image of the entire earth to date.
Display of a section of the 86400 43200 blue marble pictures that nasa derived from imagery taken in 2004.
It mainly shows the earth from the mediterranean sea to antarctica.
The shown section is 720 600 by default but can be resized using the and buttons at the top.
Using data from the moderate resolution imaging spectroradiometer modis aboard nasa s terra satellite scientists and data visualizers stitched together a full year s worth of monthly observations of the land surface coastal oceans sea ice and clouds into.
The original blue marble was a composite of four months of modis observations with a spatial resolution level of detail of 1 square kilometer per pixel.
The resolution holds up to about 1 2 000 000 so it s great for global and regional maps.
Fewer people know that nasa also studies earth.
The next generation blue marble everyone knows that nasa studies space.
The blue marble is an image of earth taken on december 7 1972 from a distance of about 29 000 kilometers 18 000 miles from the planet s surface.
This was the first time the apollo trajectory.
Next generation offers greater spatial detail of the surface and spans a longer data collection period than the original.