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epicsidebyside

There are a myriad of satellites in orbit of Globe with cameras that can send back amazing photos, but they can't snap a photo of the unabridged planet at in one case. NASA'due south Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC) photographic camera can, though. Information technology sends back thousands of amazing photos every year, and now you can peruse them more easily with the new website. It is, cartel I say, epic.

Epic is a 4MP CCD camera with a telescope mounted on the NOAA DSCOVR satellite (Deep Infinite Climate Observatory, informally known as GoreSat). It was launched in 2015 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, merely it wasn't just headed to low-Globe orbit similar so many other payloads.

The DSCOVR satellite made its fashion out to the L1 Lagrangian point. Lagrangian points are locations of gravitational equilibrium between 2 bodies. In this instance, L1 allows the satellite to remain in between Earth and the sun. It e'er has a view of the daylight side of World, which is platonic for taking images. The instrument is 1 million miles away from Earth and 92 1000000 miles abroad from the sun.

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The DSCOVR satellite has several other instruments, simply what we're interested in here is NASA'south EPIC camera. Information technology's designed to take ten narrow-band spectral images of Globe from 317 to 780 nanometers. Information technology combines those into an image that looks much like what the human being center would encounter. You can encounter above an instance image with natural color on the left and enhanced color on the correct.

Ballsy captures an image every hour from mid-April to mid-Oct, and one every 2 hours for the residuum of the year. That adds up to a huge number of images, all available for public consumption. The new Ballsy site makes that a more pleasant experience. There'southward now a floating magnifier feature that lets you lot see up close what'southward in each image. Over on the left is the image info box that tells yous when the image was acquired. That'due south important considering the axial tilt will determine which hemisphere is most visible at different times of the year. If you want to see a different view, there's a filmstrip at the bottom to page through images and a agenda on the left to bound farther.

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At that place's a gallery on the site that shows off some of the more notable images like moon transits and eclipses (which are amazing). And of course, you can download any paradigm y'all want from the site.