The Best Photo Of Earth Ever Taken

Cool picture!!!!

Call me a little paranoid, but why do I get the feeling that the Russians are interested in more than just the weather?

The article provides a link to a time-lapse movie of several days and nights. The Sun does not appear in the movie. It ought to be visible as it passes behind the Earth and reemerges on the other side. I suppose they must have digitally removed it, but I'm wondering why they did that. Maybe the camera includes a mask to filter out the Sun to prevent overexposure or damage to the camera. (?)

See #1, it's probably some feindish Rusky plot to keep all the Solar energy for themselves.
Del

I know, I know.........................there I go thinking about stuff again.

Anybody knows that it requires a 121 megapixel camera to observe weather patterns.

Good thing I'm not a conspiracy theorist....................I'd think that they were trying to tell us that they've got some powerful stuff in space too.

I too found odd that the sun (or street lights) isn't visible. Not a definite answer, but I think it must have something to do with the images being composites of 4-5 different spectrums (filters).

One probably wouldn't see individual street lights at 1km² per pixel.

Right. City lights, then. Let's not split hairs.

Do you think maybe that they just deleted that portion of the time lapse where the sun emerges? It is likely the photos would be overexposed for their demonstration. I can see the sun cross the land and Indian Ocean in reflection. The camera is situated at 38,000 kilometers in geosync.

I was unable to get the zoom portion to work but that may just be me not doing something right or rather doing something wrong. Anyone else with same problem? I thought it would have been nice to zoom both day and night. Google Earth still seems better.

I think that, if the middle the earth-sphere were in the middle of the camera frame, then you would see the earth eclipse the sun four or five times. But, since the camera is above the orbital plane, and the sun is some 90 million miles away, the distances and angles are such that the sun, essentially, passes unseen in the distant background, ''over'' the earth, outside the view of the camera, without the use of filters...

Nice picture. I did notice at high zoom a bit of a registration problem. I don't know whether that is in the original or the reproduction that we're looking at.

The time lapse is cool too:

http://www.wxyz.com/dpp/news/you-havent-seen-earth-like-this-before