Thursday, May 17, 2012

A time-lapse of Planet Earth with Electro-L Weather Satellite

Northern Hemisphere

Southern Hemisphere

From Mashable

A time-lapse of Planet Earth, created from images produced by the geostationary Electro-L Weather Satellite.
The images were obtained beginning on May 14th, and end on May 20th 2011.
Eclipsing NASA’s updated “Blue Marble” shot, which is a composite of many satellite images, this image is a single-shot taken from 22,369 miles away by Russian weather satellite Elektro-L No.1.
(see Russian Federal Space Agency)

They are taken every half hour, and have been interpolated (smoothed) to create this video.
The images are taken in four different wavelengths of light, three visible, and one infrared.

 October 2011 to March 2012

The colors are quite different from the ones on NASA’s photos of Earth.
The images are the largest whole disk images of our planet, each image is 121 megapixels, and the resolution is 1 kilometer per pixel.

To capture the image, the satellite combines visible and infrared wavelengths of light.
The infrared light is reflected by forests and vegetation, which appear orange in these images, which is why the parts of the Earth that would normally be green are seen as rusty brown.
You can explore the zoomable version of the image here.

Links :
  • NTs OMZ image gallery (source)
  • Gizmodo : Why do these breathtaking Russian images of Earth look so different from NASA’s?

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