Blue marble in space, a ginormous NASA picture of Earth

If you need something huge to start your day, head over to Flickr and get a NASA picture of Earth. I am all for high resolution images, always hinting to clients especially for print projects, “be sure your images are print-ready.” But when NASA releases an image it is far from high resolution – it is a whooping 64 megapixels or 8000 X 8000 pixels wide! Now that size image can bring even Photoshop to its knees.

NASA’s newest Earth observation satellite, the just-renamed Suomi NPP satellite took numerous images on January 4, 2012 with on-board equipment called Visible/Infrared Imager Radiometer Suite or VIIRS. The final image is composed of a number of swaths of the Earth’s surface that equate to 1 mile per pixel. VIIRS images the surface in long wedges measuring 3,000 kilometers (1,900 miles) across. The swaths from each successive orbit overlap one another, so that at the end of the day, the sensor has a complete view of the globe. The Arctic is missing because it is too dark to view in visible light during the winter.


So in comparison, the consumer level Canon EOS Rebel T3i, released early last year for a little over $1000, maxes out at 18 megapixels. The largest consumer LCD computer monitor is probably the Dell UltraSharp U3011 at 30-inches capable of displaying 2560 X 1600 pixel resolution. So I will probably be waiting a bit for a 8000×8000 pixel screen to use NASA’s image as a desktop background.