A zoomable image of the Earth in all its glory has become the latest viral sensation, but you'll have to wait a bit to experience it.
Fortunately, that's not the best part.
Educator James Drake posted photos taken by the Russian weather satellite Elektro-L to his website, planet--earth.ca (with two hyphens). Unfortunately, the images have become too expensive to host, Drake wrote, and he plans to embed them in a torrent file soon.
According to Wikipedia, the Elecktro-L satellite rotates in a geostationary orbit above the Earth's surface, never moving beyond its assigned position. Since it's a Russian satellite, the images are of that half of the Earth's sphere, covering Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Australia. The satellites have a mass of about 1620 kg and are designed to operate for 10 years each, Wikipedia reports.
The satellite's cameras are powerful enough that they can provide images with 1 kilometer per pixel for the visible band and 4 km per pixel for infrared frequencies. The images are taken in four different wavelengths of light, three visible, and one infrared. That, in part, is why the image returns quite a bit of red, from all of the vegetation.
Each image created by the satellite is 121 megapixels, the largest whole-disk images of the planet ever created.
Drake also stitched together photos taken by the satellite to create some amazing time-lapse videos. Each image was taken every half hour, and Drake interpolated or smoothed each image to create the video. We've included one of the time-lapse videos of Europe and the Middle East below; check out Drake's site (or YouTube) for the remainder.
Quite frankly, the most awe-inspiring videos on Drake's site aren't from the Elecktro-L satellite, however, but videos taken by the International Space Station as it swoops over our planet. Some of those can be viewed on Drake's archive of ISS videos. We've embedded two beautiful videos - one flying over a thunderstorm at night, looking out at the stars; and two, flying over the Great Lakes, with the aurora borealis in the distance - below as well.
For more from Mark, follow him on Twitter @MarkHachman.
