The recent landing of the Curiosity spacecraft on Mars and the death of Neil Armostrong, the first man who walked on the Moon, have renewed interest in space exploration in recent days. The topic, always fascinating, has been treated several times in this blog where websites, programs, simulators and space games that can be enjoyed for free have been reported (see at the end of the article). In this new episode on Space, we see the best sites from which to see images of the Earth from the satellites that go around the planet .
With current resources, seeing images of the Earth from space is not just an exploration from "Google Earth" but a real discovery made through very high resolution images and photos.
1) The first site to go to see planet Earth as if you were on the moon or another distant planet is that of Google Earth View, which shows full-screen backgrounds of satellite images of special and mysterious or spectacular places to watch .
In addition, planets and space can be explored in Google Maps you can explore in 3D as if it were the Earth in Google EArth, with truly high quality images.
2) A beautiful 8 Megapixel photo shot that can be downloaded from Flickr and saved on the computer for use as a desktop background should be from NASA. Even bigger is the shot taken by a Russian satellite, the largest Earth photo there is, from 121 MegaPixel .
It can be viewed in a zoomable way from the Gigapans website where it can be viewed in full screen.
3) Zoom Earth is an online version of the Earth seen from satellite, similar to Google Earth, with the only difference that it uses Bing Maps 3D maps.
The site is very fast and works smoothly both in full screen and in a browser window. You can navigate around by zooming in and out and using the mouse to travel from one part of the world to another. You can also search for a specific place by keyword.
4) Earth Froms Space is an online exhibition of images of the planet Earth of different types. In the Online Exhibition you can select images of water, life on the planet, human constructions or soil. Each image can be enlarged and is also explained in English.
5) Views Of The Earth does not provide real photos but reconstructed images. Even so, it is a great source of extraordinary views of the earth's surface, where you can see different regions, peninsulas, islands, mountains, canyons and landscapes around the world. Each image has the shooting coordinates, altitude, camera angle and exact location on the world map.
6) SpaceImages.com is a very old site that comunqu has a large collection of images with photos of the Earth, hurricanes or cities seen from above.
7) The Earth Observatory from the NASA website provides some images that can be navigated by category and by location on the world map. Some wonderful images have been collected on this American site.
Visible Earth is a NASA satellite imagery catalog that features many images including fires and storms.
Some of the most beautiful images of Earth seen from space or NASA satellites are collected on this page
On the //epic.gsfc.nasa.gov/ page you can see images of the Earth today, taken from space, by the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) satellite, which is located over a million kilometers from Earth.
Finally, I remember that it can be installed as a desktop wallpaper with the Earth seen from space.
Below you can see one of the best videos in Timelapse.
In other articles we have seen:
- The interactive planetarium with the 3D solar system.
- Stellarium program to see stars and constellations.
- Spaceship simulator in spaceship.
- Best astronomy sites
- Online telescope to explore space
