Daily Veiws Earth Website: NASA Shows Images Available From EPIC Space Camera

NASA recently launched a new website where images of the full sunlit side of the earth will be shown every day, according to a news release.

The images are taken by a NASA camera 1 million miles away on the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR), a partnership between NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the U.S. Air Force.

Each day, NASA will show 12 colored images of the earth, which will be acquired 12 to 36 hours earlier by NASA's Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC). The images will show the earth as it rotates, which will depict the whole globe over the course of a day. The EPIC images will also enable persons to archive the images, which can be searched by date and continent, according to the news release.

The EPIC images of the earth will enable scientists to evaluate daily variations over the entire globe, such as vegetation, the ozone, aerosols, and cloud height and reflectivity. EPIC is a four megapixel CCD camera and telescope. The color Earth images are created by combining three separate single-color images to create a photographic quality image equivalent to a 12-megapixel camera. The camera takes a series of 10 images using different narrowband filters from ultraviolet to near infrared to produce a variety of science products. Each image is about three megabytes in size.

"The effective resolution of the DSCOVR EPIC camera is somewhere between 6.2 and 9.4 miles (10 and 15 kilometers)," said Adam Szabo, DSCOVR project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland.

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