How NASA Creates Earth from Hundreds of Images

Ever wonder how NASA takes images from satellites in orbit and recreates the Earth from those images? NASA has posted an article highlighting Helen-Nicole Kostis, shown in the above image, who is a NASA scientific visualizer. It is her job to combine hundreds of images into a single image that can be mapped onto a globe.

The Earth floats delicately in space, sunlight illuminating the fluid mottling of white clouds suspended over its surface. The scene, the leading sequence in a recent NASA video about ship pollution and clouds, shows our planet from a perspective only a satellite or spacecraft could provide.

However, no camera captured that image of the Earth. The reason? It’s not one image. Instead, the single cloud-scattered globe is a mosaic of 298 smaller images of close-up areas of our planet meticulously stitched together by Helen-Nicole Kostis, a NASA science visualizer.

via NASA – Behind-the-Scenes View Shows How NASA Science Visualizer Creates Earth from Hundreds of Images.

This story written by Paul Adams

Paul Adams leads an award-winning, diverse contractor team that runs a federal high performance computing facility where he has worked for 17 years. He loves getting his hands on the latest visualization and computer hardware, astronomy, aerospace engineering, working with the poor, and ringing cowbells.