Nasa picture of the day earth at night professional#

There's even a gargantuan, 54000 x 27000-pixel image, guaranteed to crash any browser, for those who dare. It started as an unremarkable flicker in the night sky. But if you want to download and explore the original image yourself, you can. We cut a few smaller images from the huge global map. Explanation: This is what the Earth looks like at night. Simmon ( NASA / GSFC ), NOAA / NGDC, DMSP Digital Archive.

Nasa picture of the day earth at night professional#

'It's like having three simultaneous low-light cameras operating at once and we pick the best of various cameras depending on where we're looking in the scene,' Steve Miller, a researcher at NOAA's Colorado State University Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere, tells NASA. Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. If the signal in each pixel is too dark, it's amplified if it's too bright, it's prevented from oversaturating. And the optics aboard the Suomi NPP satellite isn't just your standard issue 5D with a superlens the imager repeatedly scans a scene and turns it into pixels. NASA says that in addition to just making pretty pictures of the planet, the specialty camera will aid in nighttime forecasting, giving researchers clearer pictures of storm, fog and other weather conditions.