What is Blue Marble?
Blue Marble - The Photo
Blue Marble is the name given to the most famous photograph taken of planet Earth.
The photo was taken on 7 December, 1972, by the crew of the Apollo 17 spacecraft. The photo was taken from a distance of about 45,000 kilometers from Earth.
Here’s Blue Marble - the photo:
Blue Marble - The Photo Series
Blue Marble is also the name that NASA has given to a series of Earth photos. As technology has advanced, NASA has been able to take more detailed imagery of Earth from space. In 2002, NASA produced the (then) most detailed, true-color image of Earth ever. It was able to do this by stitching together imagery from the Terra satellite.
Then in 2005, NASA was able to produce an image with twice the detail. This version is called Blue Marble: Next Generation and uses imagery taken from the Terra and Aqua satellites. To obtain the data, these satellites use a NASA sensor called the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS).
Blue Marble - Free to Download!
All Blue Marble images are available free of charge to educators, scientists, museums, businesses, and the public.
The collection includes images that are sized for different media, including Web and print. Users can download images of the entire globe, or just selected regions of interest.
You can download Blue Marble from NASA’s Visible Earth website.
Tags: earth, earth photos
