NASA's posting daily photos of earth on a new website, captured by a camera 1 million miles away.
Posted: 21/10/2015 - 15:41
Earth rotates through an entire day as captured in this animation of 22 still images taken on Sept. 17, 2015 by NASA’s Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC) camera on the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) spacecraft. Credits: NASA
NASA has launched a website where new images of the full, sunlit side of the earth can be viewed daily.
The camera capturing the images is actually one million miles away on the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR), a partnership between NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the U.S. Air Force.
The daily images will have been captured by the Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC) 12-36 hours prior to posting and will be presented in a sequence, showing the earth as it rotates through a full day's cycle.
EPIC is actually a 4MP CCD camera and telescope and three separate colour images are captured and combined into the 12Mp full-colour images available for viewing on the NASA website. There aren't any stars in the images as very short exposure times are used (20-100 milliseconds) to capture the images of earth which is actually very bright sat against the darkness that surrounds it. The stars are much fainter and as a result, aren't captured on the exposures.
"The effective resolution of the DSCOVR EPIC camera is somewhere between 6.2 and 9.4 miles (10 and 15 kilometres)," said Adam Szabo, DSCOVR project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland.
Visit the EPIC website to see the daily images.
(Via DSCOVR)
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