Original Article on Wired Magazine

By Mark Brown, Wired UKLast week, NASA released its 2012 version of the famous Blue Marble image. By using a planet-pointing satellite, Suomi NPP, the space agency created an extremely high-resolution photograph of our watery world.Now, responding to public demand, the agency has created a companion image: this time focusing its lens toward the East and showing Africa, Saudi Arabia and India.The Suomi NPP satellite hugs the Earth too closely to get this kind of image in one shot. Its in a polar orbit with an altitude of 824 kilometers, but the perspective of the Eastern hemisphere Blue Marble is from 12,743 kilometers away.As such, Nasa Goddard oceanographer Norman Kuring used images from six different orbits of the satellite over an eight-...(read more)