3/5: True color Earth

This is the Astronomy Pic of the Day today and they explain it better than I could:

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/

I've seen this floating around in other places but haven't put it up here yet. But this one's special because we already made such a big deal out of the beautiful "earth at night" shot last year. This is a similar thing, done by the same people, only during the day. They only shot on cloud-free days...

It's interesting because even the most densely-populated bits are green.

The little dot just leaving Rome - is that guy from yesterday's IotD.

Take a look at some of the spots just north of Australia along the coast, where the color is blue-grren. Any guesses what that is? The one that I wonder about (and which, frankly, looks like an error of some sort to me) is the bright cyan just southeast of Florida. . .

Turquoise-clear shallow water reef areas?

I've always thought those were so beautiful.

are they reefs, or really bad polution? If I recall correctly, we had a previous IoTD featuring pollution in the water that was a lovely shade of tourquoise...

IT's shallower water...and much more obvious in the high-res version: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/0203/earthtruecolor_nasa_big.jpg

You can purchase a poster of this image here , and a poster of the nighttime image here .
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The nighttime poster currently sits framed on my living room wall. When I get some spare cash I plan on getting the daytime poster, framing it, and putting it right above the nighttime one. Perhaps it will help me keep perspective. :)