Did you feel like you were being watched on Saturday? In fact, you were, and we have the pictures right here to prove it. Reacting to the groundswell of admiration for its full-disk pictures of Earth we showed you last week, the NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio uploaded these brand new shots of our blue marble, taken Saturday, March 6, 2010.
The scientists from Goddard were amazed at the reaction all around the blogosphere to the shot of the earth we showed you a couple of weeks ago, especially since it's been the default wallpaper on the iPhone since its debut, and has been around for years. They figured they'd really dazzle us with these even-sharper and newer shots, and they've succeeded in a profound way. Be sure to click on the pictures in the gallery below for intense enlargements.
But wait, that's not the half of it. The most spectacular visual of our planet is one we can't paste in here, but it will be worth your while to follow this link and be astonished by an HD moving image of the Earth as it looked on a single day, on January 2, 2009. These were all taken by the GEOS-5 satellite (Goddard Earth Observing System Model, Version 5). Before it became grossly overused, this is what the word "awesome" really meant. So were you smiling? We are now.
Here's another sequence of images, taken by GOES-5 on August 17-26, 2009:
Goddard Space Flight Center, via Flickr
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Tuesday, 9 March 2010
Were you smiling? 10/03/06 GEOS-5 portrait of Earth
via dvice.com