NASA has pieced together a patchwork of 36,422 individual photos from 113 countries to form a selfie collage. The April, 2014 undertaking was for the celebration of Earth Day.

According to NASA, the result is a zoomable 3.2-gigapixel image that people can scan and explore to take a closer look at the variety of pictures. The mosaic is hosted on the Web by GigaPan.

The mosaic is based on views of each hemisphere that were captured on April 22, 2014, by the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite instrument on the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (NPP) satellite, a joint NOAA-NASA mission. The diagonal stripes in the images are due to the satellite capturing the reflection of sunlight off ocean waters.




The space agency was inundated with photographs from more than 100 countries, which were used to create the final interactive image, which can be viewed on the GigaPan site.



I am sure the NSA is also enjoying the newly compiled database of facial images from around the world!