It’s been said that one of the reasons Earth Day was started back in 1970 was because of the images of Earth from space taken during the Apollo missions to the Moon. So, what better way to celebrate than to see how Earth looks today from space?
NOAA’s GOES-East satellite captured this stunning view of the Americas on Earth Day, April 22, 2014 at 11:45 UTC/7:45 a.m. EDT.
Find out more about this image and what all is visible here.
More satellite images will likely be taken today, and we’ll add them as they become available.
A pretty picture, but it brings to mind one of my pet peeves: It is out of perspective and gives the impression that the USA as well as South America are much larger than reality. Too many Americans already think the USA is bigger than the rest of the planet combined. I’ll get off my soapbox now.
@Postmanl: Its a US weather satellite positioned in syncronous orbit for our hemisphere. Sadly it is not out at the moon, so it only covers the way very wide lenses do. Yeah, we Americans do have a bit too much tendency towards naval gazing, but my pet peeve is that humanity hasn’t seen fit to have a proper long term moon outpost from which to take whole earth pictures with a long portrait type lens.
Even the recent Chinese lander has its normal cameras with wide lenses for the local scene. It’s telescope is in the UV range, it seems, and they too express their national pride when choosing shots of earth.
The time of the pic says 7:45 am, I live in east tn, the sun would have not been up long but the pic has the entire north/south continents in daylight.