This view of Earth at night is a cloud-free view from space as acquired by the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership Satellite (Suomi NPP). A joint program by NASA and NOAA, Suomi NPP captured this nighttime image by the satellite’s Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS). The day-night band on VIIRS detects light in a range of wavelengths from green to near infrared and uses filtering techniques to observe signals such as city lights, gas flares, and wildfires. This new image is a composite of data acquired over nine days in April and thirteen days in October 2012. It took 312 satellite orbits and 2.5 terabytes of data to get a clear shot of every parcel of land surface.

NASA asked the public to vote on their favourite images from more than 120 images in the online ‘Earth as Art’ collection acquired by the Landsat programme over the last 40 years. The winner was this image, called Van Gogh from Space due to its similarity to Van Gogh’s painting Starry Night. In the satellite photo, acquired on 13 July 2005, massive congregations of greenish phytoplankton swirl in the dark water around Gotland, a Swedish island in the Baltic Sea.

More via The Telegraph picture gallery

Watch this.

That’s all I’m really wanting to say on this one. I’ve posted some previous time lapse videos, but this one has the unique position to be shot from aboard the International Space Station using a special 4K resolution, low light camera at night and daaaamn the resulting beauty of the spinning Earth is just breathtakingly amazing.

I’d rant on and on about it, but really, just check it out for yourself (be sure to do so in HD):

Isn’t that just incredible? From the familiar sights of coastlines and lakes to the strangely foreign spread of the the city lights, to the wonderfully detailed clouds and thunderstorms; all of them floating and spinning together… hell, I get so lost in the simple beauty of it, I almost forget about the whole aurora part being in there too and that part is really amazing. Those towering red and green lights, floating high above the Earth, with the ‘tiny’ cities below and the stars as a backdrop are all so spectacularly captured in this video, to me, they illustrate a grand scale to the Earth and its relationship to the cosmos that’s really not often seen enough. Or at least, not this simple and beautiful in its execution.