Watch Earth as it rotates on new NASA website

Washington, Oct 20: NASA has launched a new website where you can see images of the full, sunlit side of the Earth as it rotates every day.

Once a day, the US space agency will post at least a dozen new colour images of Earth acquired from 12 to 36 hours earlier by NASA's Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC).

Each daily sequence of images will show the Earth as it rotates, thus revealing the whole globe over the course of a day.

The new website also features an archive of EPIC images that can be searched by date and continent.

The images are taken by a NASA camera one million miles away on the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR), a partnership between NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the US Air Force, said a NASA statement.

EPIC is a four megapixel CCD camera and telescope. The camera takes a series of 10 images to produce a variety of science products.

"The effective resolution of the EPIC camera is somewhere between 10-15 km," said Adam Szabo, DSCOVR project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre in Maryland.

Since Earth is extremely bright in the darkness of space, EPIC has to take very short exposure images (20-100 milliseconds).

The much fainter stars are not visible in the background as a result of the short exposure times.

The url of the new website is http://epic.gsfc.nasa.gov.

IANS