Sometimes we take the things that are right under our nose for granted. Take our planet, for example: the beautiful blue and green orb that we live on, but that we rarely ever really see.
However, now, we can see the beauty of Earth in a brand new video, made from high-resolution photos lovingly stitched together for a look at Earth from space. And the result is probably one of the most gorgeous videos you'll ever see.
You'll want to make sure that you go into fullscreen mode to get the full effect of the four-minute video. Also, prepare to have your mind blown as you see the Earth in all its natural beauty.
James Tyrwhitt-Drake, a graduate student at the University of Victoria, created the video by putting together images from Russia's Elektro-L weather satellite. The Elektro-L takes a shot of Earth every half hour as it orbits the planet every 24 hours, in 4K resolution. In the video, the resolution is 3840 x 2160, which is definitely what we'd consider as high-definition. But if you want a higher definition, Tyrwhitt-Drake recommends you just ask.
Elektro-L is about 25,000 miles above the Indian Ocean. When it rotates, it remains over the same spot on Earth.
Because the satellite's cameras are so sensitive to light, both visible and near-infrared, vegetation shows up brightly in the images. However, in the original images, those plants look red, but Tyrwhitt-Drake adjusted it so they looked more like how we saw them: green.
Tyrwhitt-Drake did some other editing as well.
"The images were resized by 50 percent, misalignments between frames were manually corrected, and image artifacts that occurred when the camera was facing towards the sun were partially corrected," he says. "The images were interpolated by a factor of 20 to create a smooth animation."
It might also seem odd that the video shows no city lights. However, this is perfectly normal. Believe it or not, all those bright city lights are a lot less bright than the reflection of sunlight bouncing off the Earth. If the camera picked up those city lights, the images would suffer from overexposure.
[Photo Credit: James Tyrwhitt-Drake]
