Watch a whole year on Earth spin by from over a million kilometres away

Friday, 22 July 2016

Want to feel small in the dimensions of both time and space?

Have we got the video for you. Nasa just released this clip - a timelapse made of thousands of satellite photos - which shows an entire year on Earth from the perspective of a million miles away. It's breathtaking.

The images come from Nasa's Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) satellite's Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC) (okay, we get it Nasa, you like acronyms).

DSCOVR is currently orbiting 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometres) away from Earth, snapping a dozen pictures a day.

**READ MORE:

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* Nasa snaps dark side of the moon | Stuff.co.nz**

Scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) use these images to track daily variations in vegetation and cloud cover.

As EPIC lead scientist (wow, what a job title) Jay Herman says in the video, cloud cover helps dictate how warm or cool our planet is, so monitoring changes in cloud patterns over time is an important task for climate scientists.

If you watch through the end, you'll catch the moon's shadow passing over our planet.

A couple times a year, things line up just right for EPIC to capture the moon itself moving in front of the globe. The result is so incredible looking that it seems kind of fake.

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