The sequence was created by James Drake, a student at the University of Victoria in Canada, using data from the Russian Federal Space Agency’s Elektro-L 1 satellite.
Launched in 2011, Elektro-L flies in geosynchronous orbit roughly 22,000 miles above the Indian Ocean. Every half hour, it takes a 121-megapixel image of the entire Earth. The data is used to take real-time observations of clouds and storm systems for weather forecasting.
Drake first came across these images when he saw a small corner of one displayed at the website Universe Today. Instantly hooked, he typed up some e-mails, used Google Translate to convert them to Russian, and sent inquiries to Roscosmos. They put him in touch with the data company that processes the pictures, which agreed to send him more.
“The first time I had downloaded the images, I got this sense of wonder and awe,” he said. “I was looking at this whole disk and it’s almost something that you can hold in your hand — this beautiful intricate marble, covered in a thin crust of water and air.”
Drake has since gathered more than 350 of these images and processed them himself. He now hosts them on his website, which zooms in on the incredibly detailed photos to feature aircraft contrails over the ocean, docks and industrial areas in China, fractal river networks in Africa, and huge cloud spirals over Ukraine.
In honor of Earth Day, Wired has put together a gallery featuring his most astounding images and videos of our glorious home planet.
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