NASA Blue Marble - The Most Detailed Photo of Asia

By Robert • August 19, 2007

This spectacular ‘blue marble’ image is the most detailed true-color image of the entire Earth to date. It was made using a collection of satellite-based observations. NASA scientists and visualizers stitched together months of observations of the land surface, oceans, sea ice, and clouds into a seamless, true-color mosaic of every square kilometer of our planet. Click on the image for a 2048×2048px version. Can you find Singapore? Yup, it’s plainly visible and are we ever tiny!

How was it done? Much of the information contained in this image came from a single remote-sensing device-NASA’s Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer, or MODIS. Flying over 700 km above the Earth on board the Terra satellite, MODIS provides an integrated tool for observing a variety of terrestrial, oceanic, and atmospheric features of the Earth. The land and coastal ocean portions of these images are based on surface observations collected from June through September 2001 and combined, or composited, every eight days to compensate for clouds that might block the sensor’s view of the surface on any single day.

The Blue Marble images form part of NASA’s Visible Earth Catalog which also provides pictures of earth by night as well as showing the extent of deforestation in Brazil from space. Images up to 21,600 pixels across are freely available to educators, scientists, museums, and the general public. Check out the Blue Marble view of North America.