NASA Takes A Global Selfie Using 36000 User Submitted Photos

How would mankind respond to aliens when they (if they), visit us? ‘But First; Let us Take a Selfie!’ The craze has gone from viral to super viral and everyone is busy posting selfies on social media. The craze isn’t only limited to a certain part of the world or to a certain class. Recently we the saw Ellen De Genere’s Oscars selfie, which became quit the thing over the internet. However, this post will leave you amazed at how far this selfie craze has gone.

Welcome to NASA where they are busy celebrating Earth Day by releasing a gigantic image of Earth, which is basically made up of more than 36,000 selfies. The 3.2 gigapizel image is zoom-able in order to allow users to search for their own pictures. How did this all happen? Well, NASA asked a simple question from people all over the world; where are you on Earth right now?’ People were asked to reply with selfies and tag the selfies with #globalselfie. According to NASA; ‘The goal was to use each picture as a pixel in the creation of a ‘Global Selfie’ – a mosaic image that would look like Earth appeared from space on Earth Day.’

NASA has now released the finished product by assembling the tagged selfies taken on and around 22^nd April, 2014. People from every country responded and posted the selfies on social media forums. The rest was simple; NASA spent weeks in working on more than 50,000 selfies that they received. Not all of them were accessible and/or usable. However, NASA still managed to come up with a 3.2-gigapixel image, which is hosted by GigaPan and can be zoomed in to check out the selfies.

Views of hemisphere were taken on 22^nd April, 2014 by the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite instrument on the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (NPP) satellite; a joint venture of NOAA-NASA Mission.

NASA is working day and night to gather more information about space and collecting information about Earth, which allows the scientists to gain a clearer picture of Earth and its features. That being said, the selfie idea sure was awesome and we can foresee this becoming a trend in the future!

Check out the Gigapan zoom-able image here