Catalog of Earth Images from Space

This is a catalog of global pictures of Earth taken from various non-orbital space missions, usually from distances as far as the Moon or greater. All the pictures were resized to the same resolution (1080x1080 pixels) and only slightly contrast adjustment were applied to some. Below each image is the corresponding date and mission. The colors are a result of the particular processing procedure performed by scientists and engineers on each mission. This collection of images is helping us to fine tune the atmospheric effects for our Visible Paleo-Earth imagery. You can click on each image for a higher resolution version.

The latest low orbit cloudless true-color satellite compositions are available from NASA Visible Earth: Blue Marble (2004) and JAXA (2003). High resolution (uncorrected and not necessarily true-color) are always available from Google Earth. Global real-time images are available from various geostationary satellites like GOES. The best source for real-time global images is NEODAAS. Check for other sources in this article and vTerrain. Meteosat-9 and Electro-L are the only two satellite today able to take real-time full-globe color pictures of Earth (not necessarily true-color). All the others satellites take most of the images in infrared and combine their data with previous color images to create artificial color versions.