The early photographs of our planet as seen from space are supposed to have fueled the ecological awareness of the early 1970s, as suddenly everyone could see how small, fragile, and together were all were on the lonely, gemlike earth set in the hostile vacuum. Now NASA has put together a high resolution animation of the earth rotating in space from satellite images.
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The Edge of the American West 
16 comments
March 4, 2010 at 10:58 am
Erik Lund
Vancouver is shown overcast. Clearly this is another NASA fakeout.
But the reason I’m wasting electrons is to say that the South Pacific is amazingly big.
March 4, 2010 at 11:39 am
ari
I’m insulted that you didn’t use the “environmental history” tag.
March 4, 2010 at 12:07 pm
erubin
That’s obsolete. Chile should be ten meters East.
March 4, 2010 at 1:24 pm
kid bitzer
there’s a sort of off-center glow, a little to the north and west of the visual center of the globe. i assume it’s a reflection of the sun? why is it in the same place throughout the film, given that the movie is made from a bunch of stills taken at different times?
either they took the shots when the sun was always at the same angle from the earth in relation to the satellite, or it’s all a hoax made up in hollywood by one-world-er liberals from the trilateral commission. if you look very closely, you can see black helicopters circling the globe.
March 4, 2010 at 1:30 pm
politicalfootball
You’re almost there, kb. But look really, really close, and you’ll realize that you can’t see the black helicopters at all. That’s how you know this animation has been doctored.
March 4, 2010 at 2:07 pm
elizardbreath
why is it in the same place throughout the film, given that the movie is made from a bunch of stills taken at different times?
The sunset line also stays in the same spot — these are (I don’t see quite how) stills taken from a camera that’s consistently in the same place in relation to the earth and the sun. The highlight looks weird to me too, though — it makes it look very phony.
March 4, 2010 at 2:12 pm
Brandon
The image was taken with the MODIS instrament, which is on both the Terra and Aqua satalites that use a particular kind of polar orbit (going from pole to pole instead of around the equator). This particular polar orbit means that the points on the same latitude will be imaged at exactly the same time of day, just a day or two later. These particular satalites have resolutions for their imagers that allow them to cover the entire globe in one or two days. What you’re seeing is probably a weeks worth of weeks images put together.
March 4, 2010 at 2:17 pm
Brandon
First “weeks” there should really be “few”.
March 4, 2010 at 3:40 pm
Colin
If weeks, how come the clouds don’t shift? I say it was posed.
March 4, 2010 at 3:53 pm
kid bitzer
whoever this “brandon” guy is, he was clearly sent over by the black helicopter people, to push the cover story.
i mean, the *invisible* black helicopters. (i’m sort of relieved to know that pf has seen them, too. when i was the only one who saw the invisible black helicopters, i worried about my sanity).
March 4, 2010 at 4:44 pm
Jason B.
I can’t see the invisible black helicopters, but I can hear them . . .
March 4, 2010 at 6:48 pm
andrew
You can’t see the black helicopters because that’s where they put the camera.
March 5, 2010 at 9:51 am
Hob
It’s much worse than you think. That mass of blackness surrounding the entire planet? THAT’S NOT SPACE. Wall to wall helicopters.
March 5, 2010 at 10:05 am
CSProf
Helicopters all the way down….
March 5, 2010 at 6:20 pm
Michael Bérubé
Oh my god, the Earth looks so precious and fragile, so vulnerable, so precarious, so in the balance, so to speak …
I just want to chomp on it and chomp on it until there’s nothing left but the chewy nougat center.
March 6, 2010 at 4:46 am
Jason B.
I’m sure that’s great comfort to the citizenry of the Democratic Chewy Republic of Central Nougat, but it’s still an imposition on the Outer Nougatians–to say nothing of us non-Nougatians.