NASA releases Earth Day 'global selfie' mosaic of planet consisting of 36,000 photos

Agence France-Presse

An image has been released by NASA showing the “Global Selfie” Earth mosaic containing more than 36,000 individual photographs from more than 50,000 images posted around the world on Earth Day, April 22.

For Earth Day this year, NASA invited people around the world to step outside to take a "selfie" and share it with the world on social media. NASA released Thursday a new view of our home planet created entirely from those photos.

The "Global Selfie" mosaic was built using more than 36,000 individual photographs drawn from the more than 50,000 images tagged #GlobalSelfie and posted on or around Earth Day on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Google+ and Flickr.

The project was designed to encourage environmental awareness and recognize the agency's ongoing work to protect our home planet.

Selfies were posted by people on every continent and 113 countries and regions, from Antarctica to Yemen, Greenland to Guatemala, and Pakistan to Peru.

The resulting global mosaic is a zoomable 3.2-gigapixel image that users can scan and explore to look at individual photos. The Global Selfie was assembled after several weeks of collecting and curating the submitted images.