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High resolution Earth Image

MonsenMonsen Administrator 🖼️ 81 images Cartographer
in Cartographic Resources
I just learned that NASA had posted a new high-resolution picture of our very own planet. I thought some of you might find this relevant. It is titled "Blue Marble", which is also the name of an earlier very famous earth image from 1972, and probably well known for all of you.
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  • jslaytonjslayton Moderator, ProFantasy Mapmaker
    The fun part is they are pretty much making a new one of those every day now with the new satellite.
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  • MonsenMonsen Administrator 🖼️ 81 images Cartographer
    edited January 2012
    That is true.
    That image is a composite image from several sattelite images though, so I doubt they bother to do the seamless merging each day. But it does open up for lots of nice images.
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  • Old GuyOld Guy
    With such amazing detail, I'm a little surprised that there are no visible signs of civilization. At this distance, I wouldn't expect a large city to be more than a blurring of a single pixel, but a network of such blurry pixels would create a pattern. I don't even see a hint of that.

    Regardless, it is a beautiful image.
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  • jslaytonjslayton Moderator, ProFantasy Mapmaker
    There are many, many visible signs of civiliation. The Southern California coast from the Mexican border northward (San Diego and LA) is all built-up areas with the characteristic gray of civilized areas, as is the area just north of the Mississippi delta (New Orleans). The most obvious human elements are the reservoirs, which appear as very dark blue threads along rivers (the Salton Sea in California is completely man-made, as is all of the greenery around it). An amusing human-caused items is the pink and green colored halves of the Great Salt Lake; it's caused by restriction of water flow by the railway that splits the lake in two.

    There are lots of visible signs of civilization, but they don't show up at large scales during the daylight hours. The most obvious human effect during daylight hours (after reservoirs) is usually the brownish pollution that hangs over areas like China's industrial areas and Mexico City. Mexico City was clouded over and the usualy haze wasn't showing in this picture, though.

    The amazing part about that image for me, though, is how very little snow cover there is for the start of January.

    On the plus side, panoramas like this one can be generated automatically these days.
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  • JimPJimP 🖼️ 280 images Cartographer
    edited January 2012
    NASA's Visible Earth site lots more satellite photos of Earth.
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  • Terraformer_AuthorTerraformer_Author Newcomer
    GOOD SAMPLING MATERIAL - YUUUMMMMMM!!!!!!
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