Earth Viewed from a Satellite; Video By NASA

NASA recently released the world’s first image of the sunlit side of our planet taken by their NOAA DSCOVR satellite’s EPIC camera. That camera has captured a full year of our planet from its location at Lagrange Point 1 about one million miles away.

Orbiting Earth at 1 M miles, it is balanced between the gravities of Earth & the Sun. EPIC takes a picture of the Earth every 2 hours, capturing weather patterns & other features. Compiling over 3,000 images, NASA put together a video showing a sunlit Earth age one full year.

Watch this time-lapse video from EPIC’s viewpoint:

Even with this sporadic view of the Earth, footage from EPIC reveals clouds moving across the globe and large weather patterns swirling across the sky. Each set of images is recorded in ten different wavelengths. The wavelengths red, green, and blue were combined to create the color that you see in the video.

Within one short year, EPIC has already seen a variety of interesting events.

Altogether, these images provide a constant view of our planet that we’ve never really had before. With DSCOVR’s mission life set at five years, we can expect more sunlit global images coming our way from EPIC for at least the next few years.