I tried setting my desktop background to the more detailed image in the link and it said something along the lines of "not enough memory". lol. So, I used the one displayed in the post instead.
FAIL. It's NOT to scale. It was stitched incorrectly. We can't tell because we do not see the stitching, but NO WAY is Mexico that large (eso es lo que ELLA dijo) and the U.S. that small. It's incorrect. This is more like it: Spoiler What do y'all think?
It looks that way because the angle at which the picture was taken. I think it looks correct. As a body of land goes into the horizon it looks smaller.
Either the Southern US coast is dirty azz hell, or that was one hell of a cleanup BP did in the Gulf....Doesn't that shade of blue entell tropical paradise???.......
No... I don't mean just the US smaller, but... look at South America... it would wrap around to the south east of that photo... which means there's not a lot of space to add Australia, and Antartica wouldn't even appear, or it would be "pushed" far from its place, appearing where Australia would.
Here's the latest, and pretty freakin' amazing! Higher resolution at the link: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/02/eastern-earth-space-photograph/
They're quite common actually. An example would be a large storm that stretches from chicago to Texas or something. A long moisture wave or something like that.
Yeah but there were four of them, equal lengths in that picture. Like a big kitty raked across the earth.
I also thought those looked freaky. What surprised me is the regularity of them. It makes me think that it is a byproduct of the kind of image made, rather than what the Earth looks like from space. I've seen countless images of the planet from space over the years, and can't recall seeing long "cloud streaks," or whatever one would call those things, appear in such a precise fashion.
Both of the 2012 Blue Marble images are taken by a new instrument aboard Suomi NPP called the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS). As for those four vertical lines: That’s the reflection of sunlight off the ocean, or “glint,” that VIIRS captured as it orbited the globe.
You can see the LA area. All the concrete makes it look white/grayish. Could probably see Houston and Mexico City if not for the clouds.
Maybe this will help. http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/viirs-globe-east.html btw, Australia is not that way.
