Amazing images from NASA Visible Earth

See

http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/view_rec.php?id=7100

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/BlueMarble/

Note the dynamics of the seasons, best seen on a 30" monitor.

It turns out that our Kindly Contributor Rob Simmon at NASA Goddard is very much involved in this beautiful work; see "The Blue Marble Next Generation - A true color earth dataset including seasonal dynamics from MODIS," by Reto Stockli, Eric Vermote, Nazmi Saleous, Robert Simmon and David Herring" at

http://veimages.gsfc.nasa.gov/7100/bmng.pdf

-- Edward Tufte, April 23, 2006