The sequence was created by James Drake, a student at the University of Victoria in Canada, using data from the Russian Federal Space Agency’s Elektro-L 1 satellite.
Launched in 2011,
Elektro-L flies in geosynchronous orbit roughly 22,000 miles above the
Indian Ocean. Every half hour, it takes a 121-megapixel image of the
entire Earth. The data is used to take real-time observations of clouds
and storm systems for weather forecasting.
Drake first came across these images when he saw a small corner of
one displayed at the website Universe Today. Instantly hooked, he typed
up some e-mails, used Google Translate to convert them to Russian, and
sent inquiries to Roscosmos. They put him in touch with the data company
that processes the pictures, which agreed to send him more.
“The
first time I had downloaded the images, I got this sense of wonder and
awe,” he said. “I was looking at this whole disk and it’s almost
something that you can hold in your hand — this beautiful intricate
marble, covered in a thin crust of water and air.”
Drake has since gathered more than 350 of these images and processed them himself. He now hosts them on his website,
which zooms in on the incredibly detailed photos to feature aircraft
contrails over the ocean, docks and industrial areas in China, fractal
river networks in Africa, and huge cloud spirals over Ukraine.
In
honor of Earth Day, Wired has put together a gallery featuring his most
astounding images and videos of our glorious home planet.
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