The Best Photo Ever Taken Of Planet Earth From Space

By Josh Tyler | Updated

This article is more than 2 years old

A few weeks ago we showed you NASA’s Blue Marble photo, the most high-resolution photo ever taken of planet Earth from space. One problem though, their image wasn’t taken in one shot. It was actually a composite cobbled together out of many different images.

This one is the real deal…

earth

The above photo was taken by the Russian weather satellite Electro-L. Unlike the Blue Marble photo this isn’t a composite; it’s one, high-resolution photo taken from space.

The Electro-L is in a geostationary orbit 36,000 kilometers above Earth’s equator. It sends back images of the planet every 30 minutes. It uses three different visible light spectrums and also photographs in infrared. Because of that, all the orange you’re seeing in the photo is actually vegitation. This is actually Earth the way no human could ever see it, with the naked eye.

Here’s a time lapse video using the images taken by Electro-L…