This Is The Definitive Photography Of Earth

Unlike NASA’s Blue Marble — which is a composite made from many different photographs — this is a portrait of Earth taken in one single shot. It’s the highest resolution image of our home planet at 121 megapixels. That’s a resolution of 100km per pixel. This image was not taken by NASA or the European Space Agency. It was taken by Russia’s latest weather satellite, the Electro-L. Elektro-L is now orbiting Earth on a geostationary orbit 36,000 kilometres above the equator, sending images every 30 minutes using a 2.56 to 16.36 Mbits per second connection with ground control. The images — and the video of the northern hemisphere — combines four light wavelengths, three visible and one infrared. The orange you are seeing here is the vegetation.