Blue Marble 2012: It is Photoshopped But it Has to Be | Quick Guide

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Sigma Space Corporation – Blue Marble: The Making of – 9 May 2012 | Sigma Space

Is it your world or theirs?

Art director Robert Simmon and NASA scientist Gene Feldman explain how the “Blue Marble” images are made.

On January 25, 2012, NASA released a composite image of the Western Hemisphere of Earth titled Blue Marble 2012. Robert Simmon is most notable for his visualisation of the Western Hemisphere.

The picture logged over 3.1 million views on the Flickr image hosting website within the first week of release. On February 2, 2012, NASA released a companion to this new Blue Marble, showing a composite image of the Eastern Hemisphere from data obtained on January 23, 2012.

The picture is composed of data obtained by the Visible/Infrared Imager Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) instrument on board the Suomi NPP satellite on January 4, 2012. The data was obtained from six orbits of the Earth by the Suomi NPP over an eight-hour period. The image was created using a near-sided perspective projection with the viewing point placed 2100 km (1300 miles) above 20° North by 100° West. This projection results in a very wide-angle presentation such as one might get with a fish-eye lens, and it does not include the whole hemisphere.

“It is Photoshopped but it has to be!”
Rob Simmon

NASA has verified all images of the 2012 “Blue Marble” are composites as they cannot get far enough away and have to combine multiple photos together. Likewise, these images do not fit together properly and due to lighting, weather and cloud interference it is impossible to collect cohesive or fully clear images to begin with.

Skull and Bones

The_Void's intrepid Photoshop guru took a look at the high resolution Flickr Blue Marble 2012 image in the popular image editing software and made some interesting discoveries.

Flipping and mirroring Nasa's composite image produces surprising results.