Astronomy:The Blue Marble

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Short description: Photograph of Earth taken by Apollo 17 crew


"Blue Marble" redirects here. For other uses, see Blue Marble (disambiguation).

The Blue Marble, taken by Harrison Schmitt of the Apollo 17 crew in 1972. The original photograph was taken with the South Pole facing the top; however, cropped, rotated, and processed versions are the most commonly used, like this one.

The Blue Marble is a photograph of Earth taken on December 7, 1972, by Harrison Schmitt aboard the Apollo 17 spacecraft on its way to the Moon.[1] Viewed from around 29,400 kilometers (18,300 mi; 15,900 nmi) from Earth's surface,[2] a cropped, rotated, and processed version has become one of the most reproduced images in history.[3][4]

In the original NASA image, named AS17-148-22727 and centered at about [ ⚑ ] 26°19′49″S 37°25′13″E / 26.33028°S 37.42028°E / -26.33028; 37.42028 with the South Pole facing upwards, The Blue Marble shows Earth from the Mediterranean Sea to Antarctica. This was the first time the Apollo trajectory made it possible to photograph the south polar ice cap, despite the Southern Hemisphere being heavily covered in clouds. In addition to the Arabian Peninsula and Madagascar, almost the entire coastline of Africa and most of the Indian Ocean are clearly visible, a cyclone in the Indian Ocean is also visible, the South Asian mainland and Australia is on the eastern limb, and the eastern part of South America lies on the western limb.

NASA has also applied the name to a 2012 series of images which cover the entire globe at relatively high resolution. These were created by looking through satellite pictures taken over time in order to find as many cloudless photographs as possible to use in the final images. NASA has verified that the 2012 "blue marble" images are composites, made from multiple images taken in low Earth orbit. Likewise, these images do not fit together properly and due to lighting, weather and cloud interference it is impossible to collect cohesive or fully clear images of the entire Earth simultaneously.[5]

Background

The Blue Marble was not the first clear color image taken of an illuminated face of Earth, since such images by satellites had already been made and released as early as 1967.[6] Apollo 17 was the second mission to include such a photo taken by a human, after the 1968 photograph Earthrise taken by William Anders of Apollo 8.

Before the Blue Marble a picture of the fully illuminated Earth by the ATS-3 satellite was used in 1968 by Stewart Brand for his Whole Earth Catalog, after campaigning since 1966 to have NASA release a then-rumored satellite image of the entire Earth as seen from space. He got inspired during an LSD trip, seeing a "psychedelic illusion" of the Earth's curvature, convincing him that a picture of the entire planet would change how humans related to it.[7][8] He sold and distributed buttons for 25 cents each[9] that asked: "Why haven't we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?"[10] During this campaign, Brand met Buckminster Fuller, who offered to help Brand with his project.[11] Several of the pins made their way to NASA employees.[8]

Circumstance

Original image, uncropped, uncorrected, and unrotated, with south-up orientation (Lunar and Planetary Institute, Apollo Image Atlas version).

The photograph was taken on December 7, 1972 aboard the Apollo 17 command module with callsign America.[12][4]

Apollo 17 was the first mission that had the opportunity to photograph most of the Earth face completely lit in daylight, an opportunity prepared for and tightly observed and vividly described by the crew.[13]

The astronauts had the Earth's South Pole facing upwards and the Sun above them (in spatial navigation terms, to their zenith)[14] when they took the image. To the astronauts, the Earth had the appearance and size of a glass marble. At that time, Africa was in noon[15] daylight and with the December solstice approaching, Antarctica was also illuminated. The picture has a 50% (26-50%) cloud cover,[16] and shows many weather systems,[17] featuring a Shapyro–Keyser cyclone near to the center of the image. Cyclone Sixteen (16B) can be seen in the upper right of the image. This storm had brought flooding and high winds to the Indian state of Tamil Nadu on December 5, two days before the photograph was taken.[18][19]

According to the photograph description by NASA it was taken at 05:39 a.m EST (10:39 UTC),[15] 5 hours 6 minutes after launch of the Apollo 17 mission,[20] and about 1 hour 54 minutes after the spacecraft left its parking orbit around Earth to begin its trajectory to the Moon.[21] Alternatively, Eric Hartwell has identified it as having been taken slightly earlier at 5 hours 3 minutes, when one crew member states having changed the f-number, presumably between AS17-148-22725, the first of the series of photos, and the following less exposed images like The Blue Marble.[4]

A copy of the modified Hasselblad 500 EL camera used.

Schmitt used a 70-millimeter Hasselblad 500 EL camera with an 80-millimeter Zeiss planar lens; the film stock was Kodak SO-368 Ektachrome film, the lens was set at f/2.8 and the shutter speed was 1/250 of a second.[22][23][24]

Release

The photograph's official NASA designation is AS17-148-22727.[25] It is the third of a series of shots which were taken just before and are nearly identical, NASA photograph AS17-148-22725[26] and AS17-148-22726, the second also having been used as a full-Earth image.[27]

The widely published versions are cropped, rotated with south pointing up relative to the capsule,[20][28] and chromatically adjusted from the original photographs.[29][30]

Authorship

NASA generally credits images to the whole crew of a mission.[4] All crew members, Gene Cernan, Ronald Evans and Harrison Schmitt, took photographs during the mission with the onboard Hasselblad. They have largely avoided definitively answering the question of the photographer's identity by each member claiming to have taken it.[31] However, interviews[14] and evidence examined by Eric Hartwell after the mission suggest that Schmitt was the photographer.[4] For example, in 2013, Schmitt gave a phone interview for the website The Phoblographer in which he explained some of the camera settings, and recalled that the reason the photograph was taken stemmed from his hobby as an amateur meteorologist, with weather prediction being a personal mission goal; Schmitt did not anticipate the image's popular acclaim.[24]

Processing

A side-by-side comparison of different white-balanced Blue Marble images.

The original camera film was rescanned in 2007 by the Arizona State University (ASU) for their Apollo Image Archive,[32] producing an extremely high resolution raw version.[33]

Chronological gallery of released versions
Great Images in NASA (GRIN) version from 2000[34]
NASA Johnson Space Center's Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth (GAPE) version cropped and adjusted by NASA (2005)[35]
Rotated and cropped 2007 rescanned high resolution version by the ASU Apollo Image Archive[32][33]
Version used on the NASA Science website (2011)[36][37]
Processed version from 2015 by NASA, produced for NASA's so-called ‘‘hyperwall’’ display[38]

Legacy

As speculated by NASA archivist Mike Gentry, The Blue Marble is among the most widely distributed images in history.[4]

Environmental movement, Earth flag, and anthem

The image was released during a surge in environmental activism during the 1970s, and became a symbol of the environmental movement, as a depiction of Earth's fragility, vulnerability, and isolation amid the vast expanse of space.[3][39]

The 1973 version of the Earth Flag, proposed by John McConnell using the Blue Marble

The phrase "blue marble" (as well as the picture itself) is frequently used, as in the Earth flag by environmental activist organizations or companies attempting to promote an environmentally conscious image.

Poet-diplomat Abhay Kumar penned an Earth anthem inspired by the Blue Marble which contains "all the peoples and the nations of the world, one for all, all for one, united we unfurl the blue marble flag".[40]

Other references

The image has been used to validate state-of-the-art atmospheric reanalysis fifty years after it was taken.[41]

There has also been a children's television program called Big Blue Marble.

Subsequent Blue Marble images

Subsequent similar images of Earth (including composites at much higher resolution) have also been termed Blue Marble images.

Blue Marble 2000

Blue Marble 2000.[42] Hurricane Linda can be seen off the coast of Mexico.

In 2000, there was a so-called Blue Marble 2000 image released. It was based on data from 1997 by the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES), Sea-viewing Wide Field-of-view Sensor (SeaWiFS) satellite and Polar Operational Environmental Satellites (POES), complemented with a digital elevation model from the U.S. Geological Survey.[43]

Blue Marble 2002

Blue Marble composite images generated by NASA in 2002, based on data from 2001.

In 2002, NASA released an extensive set of satellite-captured imagery, including prepared images suitable for direct human viewing, as well as complete sets suitable for use in preparing further works.[44] At the time, 1 km/pixel was the most detailed imagery available for free, and permitted for reuse[45] without a need for extensive preparatory work to eliminate cloud cover and conceal missing data, or to parse specialized data formats. The data also included a similarly manually assembled cloud-cover and night-light image sets, at lower resolutions. One image was used as one of the default wallpapers for the first-generation iPhone in 2007.

Blue Marble Next Generation (2005)

NASA Earth Observatory animation called Blue Marble Next Generation (2005), showing Earth in 2004.

A subsequent release was made in 2005, named Blue Marble Next Generation.[46] This series of digital image mosaics was produced with the aid of automated image-sifting upon images from NASA's Earth Observatory, which enabled the inclusion of a complete, cloud-free globe for each month from January to December 2004, at even higher resolution (500 m/pixel).[47] The original release of a single-image set covering the entire globe could not reflect the extent of seasonal snow-and-vegetative cover across both hemispheres, but this newer release closely modeled the changes of the seasons.

A number of interactive viewers for these data have also been released, among them a music visualization for the PlayStation 3 that is based on the texture data.[47][48]

Blue Marble 2007

Western Hemispheric view of the Blue Marble 2007 composite global image of Earth
Eastern Hemispheric view of the Blue Marble 2007 composite global image of Earth

Based on data from multiple satellites, from different times, were put together by a team of NASA merging layers of global data about every type of layer of features, from oceanic to atmospheric, to create the Blue Marble 2007.

Blue Marble 2012

Blue Marble 2012 – a composite satellite image.

On January 25, 2012, NASA released a composite image of the Western Hemisphere of Earth titled Blue Marble 2012. Robert Simmon is most notable for his visualization of the Western Hemisphere. The picture logged over 3.1 million views on the Flickr image hosting website within the first week of release.[49] On February 2, 2012, NASA released a companion to this new Blue Marble, showing a composite image of the Eastern Hemisphere from data obtained on January 23, 2012.[50]

The picture is composed of data obtained by the Visible/Infrared Imager Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) instrument on board the Suomi NPP satellite on January 4, 2012.[50][51] The data was obtained from six orbits of the Earth by the Suomi NPP over an eight-hour period.[50] The image was created using a near-sided perspective projection with the viewing point placed 2,100 km (1,300 miles) above 20° North by 100° West. This projection results in a very wide-angle presentation such as one might get with a fish-eye lens, and it does not include the whole hemisphere.

Blue Marble 2012 - 'White Marble' Arctic view

Another composite image from Suomi NPP with a perspective showing the North Pole was in reference to the Blue Marble as Blue Marble 2012 - 'White Marble'.

Black Marble

Black Marble – North and South America at night.[52] Hurricane Sandy can be seen off the coast of Florida.

On December 5, 2012, NASA released a nighttime view of Earth called Black Marble[52] during an annual meeting of Earth scientists held by the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.[53] The images display all the human and natural matter that glows and can be detected from space.[54] The data was acquired by the Suomi NPP satellite in April and October 2012 and then mapped over existing Blue Marble imagery of Earth to provide a realistic view of the planet.[55] The Suomi NPP satellite completed 312 orbits and gathered 2.5 terabytes of data to get a clear shot of every parcel of the Earth's land surface. Named for satellite meteorology pioneer Verner Suomi, the satellite flies over any given point on Earth's surface twice each day and flies 512 miles (824 km) above the surface in a polar orbit.[56]

The nighttime views were obtained with the new satellite's "day-night band" of the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS), which detects light in a range of wavelengths from green to near-infrared, and uses filtering techniques to observe dim signals such as city lights, gas flares, auroras, wildfires, and reflected moonlight. Auroras, fires, and other stray light have been removed in the case of the Black Marble images to emphasize the city lights.[55] The images have been used to study the spatial distribution of economic activity, to select sites for astronomical observatories, and to monitor human activities around protected areas.[55]

DSCOVR

Blue Marble 2015[57]

On July 21, 2015, NASA released a new Blue Marble photograph taken by a U.S. Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR), a solar weather and Earth observation satellite that was launched in February 2015 and provided a near-continuous view of the entire sunlit-side of the Earth.[57] The image was taken on July 6, 2015.[58] The photograph, of the Western Hemisphere, is centered over Central America. The Western United States, Mexico and the Caribbean are visible, but much of South America is hidden beneath cloud cover. Greenland can be seen at the upper edge of the image.

The EPIC science team plans to upload 13 new color images per day on their website. The color balance has been adjusted to approximate an image that could be seen with the average human eye. In addition to images, scientific information will be uploaded as it becomes available after in-flight calibration is complete. The science information will be ozone and aerosol amounts, cloud reflectivity, cloud height, and vegetation information. The EPIC instrument views the Earth from sunrise in the west to sunset in the east 12 to 13 times per day as the Earth rotates at 15 degrees of longitude per hour. Clearly visible are storms forming over the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, major slowly moving "cloud rivers", dust aerosol plumes from Africa, the Sun's reflection in the oceans, ship exhaust tracks in the clouds, rivers and lakes, and the variegated land surface patterns especially in the African deserts. The spatial resolution of the color images is about 10 km (6 miles), and the resolution of the science products will be about 20 km (10 miles). Once every three months, lunar images are obtained that are the same as those viewed from Earth during a full Moon. On occasion, the other side of the Moon will appear in the Earth images as the Moon crosses in front of the Earth.[59][60]

Animations of DSCOVR images by EPIC, likened to the Blue Marble[59]
A Sun-synchronous view of the day-side of Earth from the Sun–Earth Lagrange point L1, with Earth rotating and the Moon passing on its orbit in between the observing DSCOVR satellite and Earth, showing the Moon's far side when it is illuminated and the Moon's day-side
Satellite time-lapse imagery of Earth's rotation showing axis tilt

Blue Marble anniversary image (2022)

A color-corrected image of the Earth taken by the DSCOVR satellite on December 7, 2022, exactly 50 years after the original Blue Marble image, and compared to each other.[61]

In 2022, NASA released an anniversary image of The Blue Marble taken by DSCOVR, 50 years after the original over the same area of Earth.[61]

Hello, World

Hello, World, taken in 2026 by Reid Wiseman, commander of the Artemis II near-Moon mission.

In April 2026, Artemis II commander Reid Wiseman took a photo of the Earth from the Orion Integrity spacecraft's window, the first image of the full Earth disk taken by a person since The Blue Marble, while traveling toward the Moon for a lunar flyby. NASA's caption for the image notes that two auroras are visible and that zodiacal light can be seen as the Earth eclipses the Sun.[62] This photo was titled Hello, World. Like the original, unrotated version of The Blue Marble, this photo was taken with the South Pole facing upwards.

The image metadata indicates that it was taken using a Nikon D5 camera with a 14–24 mm f/2.8 lens at an aperture of f/4, an exposure time of 1/4 second, and an ISO setting of 51,200; the exposure was set manually and the image was later processed using Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic.[63]

Critique

The Blue Marble, and other images from space, have been in parts critically analyzed as distracting from human geographic issues and from being a technological product produced by a dominant spacefaring country, which developed the image and its overview effect as a boundless worldview instead of as an image inviting an intricate and critical overview.[64][65][66]

See also

  • List of photographs considered the most important
  • Earthrise, another widely reproduced picture of the Earth, taken in 1968 by Bill Anders aboard Apollo 8
  • Pale Blue Dot, a 1990 image of the Earth taken by Voyager 1
  • The Day the Earth Smiled, a 2013 image of the Earth taken by Cassini
  • Hello, World, a 2026 photograph of the Earth by Reid Wiseman aboard Artemis II
  • Earthset, another 2026 photograph of Earth by Christina Koch, also aboard Artemis II, similar to Earthrise
  • Pale Orange Dot, a NASA digital model showing a possible early Earth
  • DODGE, satellite which took the first color picture of the complete Earth disk
  • Earth phases from the Moon
  • First images of Earth from space
  • Himawari 8 and 9, geostationary satellites that produce an image of the Earth's full face every 10 minutes in the daytime
  • Stewart Brand § NASA images of Earth, author who lobbied NASA in 1966 to release a satellite photograph of the entire Earth because he thought it would be a powerful symbol
  • Space selfie
  • Whole Earth Catalog, an eclectic catalog compiled by Brand which was inspired in part by photographs of the Earth as a globe

References

  1. ↑ "The Most Recent Man to Walk on the Moon | Harrison 'Jack' Schmitt". November 7, 2023. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mA7UlfEASz4&t=1149s. 
  2. ↑ "Apollo 17 Day 1: Transposition, Docking and Extraction". NASA. 2022. https://history.nasa.gov/afj/ap17fj/03_day01_tde.html. "By measurement of the size of Earth's image in these photographs (29mm), they were taken at a distance of about 29,400 kilometres (15,900 nautical miles)." 
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Petsko, Gregory A. (April 28, 2011). "The blue marble". Genome Biology 12 (4): 112. doi:10.1186/gb-2011-12-4-112. PMID 21554751. 
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 "Apollo 17: The Blue Marble". April 25, 2007. http://www.ehartwell.com/Apollo17/. 
  5. ↑ "Elegant Figures – Crafting the Blue Marble" (in en). 2011-10-06. https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/blogs/elegantfigures/2011/10/06/crafting-the-blue-marble/. 
  6. ↑ Mars, Kelli (2020-12-17). "90 Years of Our Changing Views of Earth". http://www.nasa.gov/feature/90-years-of-our-changing-views-of-earth. 
  7. ↑ "Lunch with the FT: Stewart Brand". Financial Times. January 8, 2010. https://www.ft.com/content/652828ec-fbe0-11de-9c29-00144feab49a. 
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 "The Guardian Profile: Stewart Brand" (in en). 2001-08-03. http://www.theguardian.com/education/2001/aug/04/artsandhumanities.highereducation. 
  9. ↑ Brand, Stewart. "Photography changes our relationship to our planet". Smithsonian Photography Initiative. http://click.si.edu/Story.aspx?story=31. 
  10. ↑ Brand, Stewart (2009). Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto. Viking Adult. p. 214. ISBN 978-0-670-02121-5. 
  11. ↑ Leonard, Jennifer. "Stewart Brand on the long view". http://www.renegademedia.info/books/stewart-brand.html. 
  12. ↑ Cosgrove, Ben (April 11, 2014). "Home, Sweet Home: In Praise of Apollo 17's 'Blue Marble'". Time. https://time.com/3879555/blue-marble-apollo-17-photo-of-earth-from-space/. Retrieved December 7, 2019. 
  13. ↑ Latham, Katherine (2025-04-22). "How 50 years of climate change has changed the face of the 'Blue Marble' from space". https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250422-how-50-years-of-climate-change-has-changed-the-face-of-the-blue-marble. 
  14. ↑ 14.0 14.1 "The Story of Blue Marble Images, Part 2". 2022-01-04. https://cleantechnica.com/2022/01/04/the-story-of-blue-marble-images-part-2/.  From astronaut Schmitt stating that Earth was beneath them, or to their nadir.
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  21. ↑ "Apollo 17 Image Library". Apollo 17 Multimedia. NASA. https://history.nasa.gov/alsj/a17/images17.html#MagNN. 
  22. ↑ Parker, Phill. "Apollo-11 Hasselblad Cameras". Apollo Lunar Surface Journal. NASA. https://history.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/a11-hass.html. 
  23. ↑ Apollo 17 Index: 70 mm, 35 mm, and 16 mm Photographs. Mapping Sciences Branch, Johnson Space Center, NASA. May 1974. p. 88. https://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/alsj/a17/a17.photidx.pdf. 
  24. ↑ 24.0 24.1 Motal, Julius (2013-12-09). "Behind the Blue Marble: The Story Behind the Iconic Image". The Phoblographer. https://www.thephoblographer.com/2013/12/09/behind-blue-marble/. 
  25. ↑ "Apollo Imagery". NASA. November 1, 2012. https://spaceflight.nasa.gov/gallery/images/apollo/apollo17/html/as17-148-22727.html. 
  26. ↑ "March to the Moon". http://tothemoon.ser.asu.edu/gallery/Apollo/17/Hasselblad%20500EL%2070%20mm#AS17-148-22725. 
  27. ↑ "Earth from Apollo 17". 7 December 1972. http://www.astrophotolab.com/pr/AS17-148-22727.htm. 
  28. ↑ "Worth a thousand worlds". Geek Trivia (TechRepublic). December 6, 2005. http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-10881_11-5983104.html. 
  29. ↑ "AS17-148-22727". NASA. June 1, 2019. https://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/SearchPhotos/photo.pl?mission=AS17&roll=148&frame=22727. 
  30. ↑ "AS17-148-22726". NASA. June 1, 2019. https://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/SearchPhotos/photo.pl?mission=AS17&roll=148&frame=22727. 
  31. ↑ Berger, Erin (2017-12-06). "The Mystery Behind Who Took the Blue Marble Photo". https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/exploration-survival/mystery-one-most-famous-photos-ever-taken/. 
  32. ↑ 32.0 32.1 "Original Apollo Images Online". 2007-08-01. https://www.photonics.com/Articles/Original-Apollo-Images-Online/a30359. 
  33. ↑ 33.0 33.1 "March to the Moon". https://tothemoon.im-ldi.com/gallery/Apollo/17/6#AS17-148-22727. 
  34. ↑ "GPN-2000-001138". 2000-07-24. http://grin.hq.nasa.gov/ABSTRACTS/GPN-2000-001138.html. 
  35. ↑ Observatory, NASA Earth (2005-10-13). "History of the Blue Marble". https://science.nasa.gov/earth/earth-observatory/history-of-the-blue-marble/. 
  36. ↑ Cermak, Alicia (1972-12-07). "The Blue Marble". https://science.nasa.gov/resource/the-blue-marble/. 
  37. ↑ Observatory, NASA Earth (2011-10-06). "Crafting the Blue Marble". https://science.nasa.gov/blogs/earth-matters/2011/10/06/crafting-the-blue-marble/. 
  38. ↑ Studio, NASA Scientific Visualization (2015-07-20). "The Blue Marble From Apollo 17". https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/30613/. 
  39. ↑ From Popular Science, December 8, 2022
  40. ↑ Kumar, Abhay (May 24, 2013). "Voices: An anthem for the Earth". The Kathmandu Post. http://www.ekantipur.com/the-kathmandu-post/2013/05/24/onsaturday/voices/249135.html. 
  41. ↑ Lopez, Philippe (2020-11-28). "Validating the Past: Simulating the Weather in Space Mission Earth Views" (in EN). Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 101 (11): 981–984. doi:10.1175/BAMS-D-19-0254.1. ISSN 0003-0007. 
  42. ↑ Center, NASA Goddard Space Flight (2026-05-31). "History of the Blue Marble". https://www.flickr.com/photos/gsfc/albums/72157632172101342/. 
  43. ↑ Center, NASA Goddard Space Flight (2026-05-31). "History of the Blue Marble". https://www.flickr.com/photos/gsfc/albums/72157632172101342/with/8244321945. 
  44. ↑ "The Blue Marble: True-Color Global Imagery at 1km Resolution". NASA Earth Observatory. October 13, 2005. https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/BlueMarble/BlueMarble_2002.php. 
  45. ↑ Hormann, Christoph (May 30, 2007). "Earth renders using the Blue Marble 2002 data". http://www.imagico.de/pov/earth1.php. 
  46. ↑ Stöckli, Reto (January 1, 2005). "Blue Marble Next Generation". Blue Marble Research. https://bluemarble.ch/wordpress/2005/01/01/blue-marble-next-generation/. 
  47. ↑ 47.0 47.1 Stöckli, Reto (October 13, 2005). "Blue Marble Next Generation". NASA Earth Observatory. https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/BlueMarble. 
  48. ↑ Sheffield, Brandon (December 26, 2007). "Special: Q-Games on PS3's 'Gaia' Music Visualizer". Gamasutra. https://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=16748. 
  49. ↑ "Most Amazing High Definition Image of Earth – Blue Marble 2012". NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center. January 4, 2012. https://www.flickr.com/photos/gsfc/6760135001/. 
  50. ↑ 50.0 50.1 50.2 "VIIRS Eastern Hemisphere Image – Behind the Scenes". NASA. February 2, 2012. https://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/viirs-globe-east.html. 
  51. ↑ "Blue Marble, 2012". NASA. January 25, 2012. https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_2159.html. 
  52. ↑ 52.0 52.1 Cole, Steve; Leslie, John; Gran, Rani; Keck, Aries (December 5, 2012). "NASA-NOAA Satellite Reveals New Views of Earth at Night". NASA. https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/NPP/news/earth-at-night.html. 
  53. ↑ "NASA Photos Show 'Black Marble' Earth at Night". ABC News Radio. December 5, 2012. http://abcnewsradioonline.com/national-news/nasa-photos-show-black-marble-earth-at-night.html. 
  54. ↑ Samenow, Jason (December 5, 2012). "Satellites unveil Black Marble and spy on the moon". The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/post/satellites-unveil-black-marble-and-spy-on-the-moon/2012/12/05/f7984666-3f18-11e2-bca3-aadc9b7e29c5_blog.html. 
  55. ↑ 55.0 55.1 55.2 "Black Marble – Americas". NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center. April–October 2012. https://www.flickr.com/photos/gsfc/8246896289/. 
  56. ↑ "'Black Marble' images shine light upon a sleeping world". The Washington Post. December 5, 2012. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/black-marble-images-shine-light-upon-a-sleeping-world/2012/12/05/1209c30e-3f18-11e2-bca3-aadc9b7e29c5_gallery.html#photo=8. 
  57. ↑ 57.0 57.1 "A New Blue Marble". 2015-07-20. https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2015/07/20/new-blue-marble/. 
  58. ↑ Lendino, Jamie (July 21, 2015). "Humanity gets a new Blue Marble photo of Earth — and it's stunning". ExtremeTech. http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/210519-humanity-gets-a-new-blue-marble-photo-of-earth-and-its-stunning. 
  59. ↑ 59.0 59.1 Meyer, Robinson (2015-10-21). "Here's the First 'Blue Marble' Image of Each Continent". https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2015/10/blue-marble-dscovr-asia-australia-africa-europe-america/411586/. 
  60. ↑ "EPIC :: DSCOVR". Susannah Pearce. 2026-05-29. https://epic.gsfc.nasa.gov/. 
  61. ↑ 61.0 61.1 "Gallery: blue_marble". Susannah Pearce. 2022-12-07. https://epic.gsfc.nasa.gov/galleries/2022/blue_marble. 
  62. ↑ "Hello, World - NASA" (in en-US). https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/hello-world/. 
  63. ↑ "Earth From the Perspective of Artemis II" (in en-US). https://images.nasa.gov/details/art002e000192. 
  64. ↑ Flores, Teresa Mendes (2012-04-10). "The Global Imagination: from 'The Blue Marble' photograph to 'Google Earth'". https://www.academia.edu/1504724. 
  65. ↑ Biondi, Charleyne (2018-01-21). "Haris A. Durrani – The Bogotá Declaration: A Global Uprising? – Uprising 13/13". https://blogs.law.columbia.edu/uprising1313/haris-a-durrani-the-bogota-declaration-a-global-uprising/. 
  66. ↑ Bimm, Jordan (2014-02-01). "Rethinking the Overview Effect". Quest: The History of Spaceflight. https://www.academia.edu/5995107. Retrieved 2022-10-22. 
  • NASA history of Blue Marble image releases

1972 photograph

21st century NASA composite images



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