Earth, Whole

The Earth seen whole and in real colour, from a satellite a million miles away. DSCOVR sits at the Sun–Earth L1 gravity point, 1.6 million km sunward of us, and its EPIC camera takes one full-disc photograph every few hours — the only view that shows the entire sunlit half of the planet at once, clouds moving in daylight time-lapse.

This image was taken by NASA's EPIC camera onboard the NOAA DSCOVR spacecraft

Every frame in this set

What this view is for

EPIC is a science instrument: by imaging the whole planet in eleven spectral bands it measures ozone, aerosols, cloud height, vegetation and water vapour simultaneously — the daily health check of the atmosphere that geostationary satellites can only do from one side.

The pale blue dot, revisited

In 1990 Voyager 1, 6 billion km out, turned its camera back and took the first portrait of Earth from beyond the Solar System. Carl Sagan’s reflection on that pixel — “look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home.” — is the reason whole-Earth imagery carries emotional weight: every national border, city and argument fits inside one cloud-wrapped speck.

Try this

Pick two frames a day apart and watch the cloud systems rotate westward with the trade winds; find the swirl of a tropical cyclone; notice that at any moment roughly half the planet in the picture is in daylight. EPIC’s archive back to 2015 is free and public domain.

Imagery: NASA – NOAA DSCOVR/EPIC experiment · public domain.