
From a vantage point of nearly one million miles away NASA’s EPIC camera aboard NOAA’s DSCOVR satellite captures an image of the entire Earth every 1-2 hours as it rotates. For the last year and a half or so these pictures have been uploaded on the EPIC website for public viewing and use as they originally look to the EPIC instrument; now there’s an option to view Earth in “enhanced” mode, which boosts the contrast, saturation, and overall appearance to make landforms and clouds more apparent—and you can even zoom in too, in true CSI-style!
“The ‘enhanced’ color images make land features more visible,” said Sasha Marshak, DSCOVR deputy project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “This is achieved by enhancing low intensity pixel values. The effect of atmospheric haze caused by air molecular scattering and attenuation of solar light by ozone has been also removed.”
Read more from NASA here: NASA Makes an EPIC Update to Website for Daily Earth Pics