Friday 24th July 2015

Nasa has released the first picture of the Earth that it has taken in 43 years.

The picture, which has come from a camera on board the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR), is the first picture of the whole Earth that has been seen since 1972. All of the pictures since then have been produced by stitching together different pictures into a full image of the globe.

The new picture is a composite, of three separate images, but each of those images showed the whole planet. The camera takes ten images through the colour spectrum — going all the way from ultraviolent to infrared — and to make the new picture Nasa combined the red, green and blue pictures.

The photo was taken on July 6, 2015, and mostly shows North and Central America. It was taken by Nasa’s Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC), which is a four megapixel camera shooting through a telescope.

Have you got your Mug with our Mugs on yet?