Blue Marble, 2012
Earth's western hemisphere, assembled from four orbits of a polar orbiter and rendered from a computed vantage 2,124 kilometres up.
On 4 January 2012 a new NASA satellite read the Earth in strips, and four orbits of what its VIIRS instrument recorded that day became this disc. NASA published it on 25 January, one day after the spacecraft was renamed Suomi NPP for Verner E. Suomi, recognised as the father of satellite meteorology.
The disc is centred on North and Central America. VIIRS reads a strip 3,000 kilometres wide and the Earth is 12,756 kilometres across at the equator, so this hemisphere took four orbits. At full size no seam or tile boundary shows, and the light falls consistently across every landmass and cloud field. The vantage is computed: a near-sided perspective from 2,124 kilometres above 20 degrees north, 100 degrees west, against the satellite's own 830 kilometres.
