Earth Day: NASA’s spectacular view of our planet

60 photos

In the early days of space flight, the pictures harvested by the National Aeronautic and Space Administration (NASA) were blurry gray images that resembled a bad weather map. With the advent of new technology and better platforms to photograph from, such as the space shuttle and International Space Station, NASA is able to provide us with an amazing viewpoint of Earth.

In honor of Earth Day, view memorizing photos of the blue planet from space.

NASA astronauts have documented our planet since the early days of the Mercury missions in the 1960s. The photographs have been archived and comprise a database containing over 1.6 million images of Earth. More than one million of those pictures are from the International Space Station (ISS).

These images give us a dramatic bird’s-eye-view of the beauty and fury of mother nature, from majestic ice formations and stunning clouds to violent volcanoes and deadly mega-storms. This unique view, which can be found on the NASA website “Visible Earth,” provides us with a gateway to a new perspective and unimaginable imagery.