NASA releases 'global selfie' of Earth

For the first time, NASA has released a 'global selfie' created by combining over 36,000 pictures clicked by individual people from more than 113 countries and regions.
For Earth Day this year, NASA invited people around the world to step outside to take a "selfie" and share it with the world on social media.
NASA then released a new view of our home planet created entirely from those photos.
The "Global Selfie" mosaic was built using over 36,000 individual photographs drawn from the more than 50,000 images tagged #GlobalSelfie and posted on or around Earth Day on several social media sites.

The project was designed to encourage environmental awareness and recognise the agency's ongoing work to protect our home planet.
Selfies were posted by people from every continent and 113 countries and regions.

The resulting global mosaic is a zoomable 3.2-gigapixel image that users can scan and explore to look at individual photos. The Global Selfie was assembled after several weeks of collecting and curating the submitted images.
"With the Global Selfie, NASA used crowd-sourced digital imagery to illustrate a different aspect of Earth than has been measured from satellites for decades: a mosaic of faces from around the globe," said Peg Luce, deputy director of the Earth Science Division in the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters, Washington.

"We were overwhelmed to see people participate from so many countries. We're very grateful that people took the time to celebrate our home planet together, and we look forward to everyone doing their part to be good stewards of our precious Earth," said Luce.
The GigaPan image of Earth is based on views of each hemisphere captured on Earth Day 2014 by the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite instrument on the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (NPP) satellite.