Wednesday, March 03, 2010

Earth's Latest Portrait



Using a collection of satellite images, scientists painstakingly stitched together months of observations to create a montage which shows the surface of the continents and oceans in stunning detail.


Nice picture.

But I have another one of those silly questions:

If this is a "montage" painstakingly stitched together over several months, how did they manage to get all those clouds to stay in exactly the same place during all those months of picture taking?

Seems to me that - in order to get a photograph of earth with all the clouds appearing to have been taken by a single snapshot, it would have to be a single snapshot.

So what did NASA do? Take a single snapshot of all the clouds and then superimpose it over their painstakingly stitched together montage of earth?

I suspect that whoever wrote this article - or whoever released it for public consumption - didn't get the story quite right.

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