EPIC SELFIE
More than 36,000 photos from around the world help NASA create an image of the planet on Earth Day 2014
It may take a village to raise a child, but it takes 36,422 selfies to create a planet.
That’s exactly what happened when the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration asked people on Earth Day — April 22 — a simple question: Where are you on Earth right now?
Using social media, the agency requested people to answer with a “global selfie” and submit it, with a plan to use each one as a pixel in a mosaic image resembling what the Earth looked like that day from space.
NASA has now released online the resulting image that allows a visitor to click and zoom in to different countries and view all 36,422 of the components up close.
It’s literally a trip around the world via people portraits.
Ciao NASA! Sono sulla Terra in questo momento (‘Hi NASA! I’m on Earth right now’)”
From a distance, the mosaic looks like the planet, partly covered in clouds and a little bit fuzzy, with the continents clearly visible.
But as you draw the planet image closer using the zoom tool, thousands of faces appear, some holding signs, others simply posing with friends and family, or in front of their favourite geography or architecture.
“Ciao NASA! Sono sulla Terra in questo momento (‘Hi NASA! I’m on Earth right now’)” says the sign a man is holding from Lugano, a city in southern Switzerland near the Italian border.
There are selfies from boardrooms, classrooms, minivans and deserts. People also submitted a plethora of pet selfies.
People on every continent — 113 countries and regions — responded and posted their global selfies. The pictures came from as far away as Antarctica, Yemen, Greenland to Micronesia, Maldives, Pakistan and Poland, using Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Google+ and Flickr, NASA said.
The mosaic was created after weeks of curating more than 50,000 submissions, whittling it down to the ones that were usable.
The “zoomable” 3.2-gigapixel image is hosted on the web by GigaPan, a commercial spinoff of a research collaboration between a team of researchers at NASA and Carnegie Mellon University.
Views of each hemisphere on Earth Day 2014 were captured by satellite using infrared imaging.