NASA has stitched together 36,477 selfies taken on Earth Day this year to create a 3.2-gigapixel "Global Selfie" mosaic forming an image of our planet as it looked on April 22, 2014.
The space agency solicited the photos on Earth Day via social media, asking people to answer the question, "Where are you on Earth Right Now?" along with submitted a self-snapped photo of themselves. A month later, the zoomable, GigaPan-hosted final product was published on the Internet.
"The image was built using 36,422 individual photos that were posted on social media and tagged #globalselfie on or around April 22, 2014," NASA said in a news release. "People on every continent 113 countries and regions in allposted selfies. From Antarctica to Yemen, Greenland to Guatemala, Micronesia to the Maldives, Pakistan, Poland, Peruand on. The image was assembled after weeks of curating more than 50,000 #globalselfie submissionsnot all were accessible or usablefrom Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Google+, and Flickr."
On Earth Day, NASA captured views of Earth's eastern and western hemispheres with the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (NPP) satellite operated jointly by the space agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The satellite's Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite instrument captured those views of the planet, complete with cloud cover and sunlight reflecting off ocean waters.
And as cool as the massive Global Selfie is on its own, NASA was clear in tying the Earth Day project into its much larger mission of monitoring our home planet from space.
"NASA scientists have helped identify thousands of new planets in recent years, but the space agency studies no planet more closely than our own. With 17 Earth-observing satellites in orbit, bolstered by ambitious airborne and ground-based observation campaigns, NASA data helps scientists piece together a clearer picture of Earth's atmosphere, land and ocean," NASA said.