NASA has opened a new website to host the photographs of the Earth taken by the DSCOVR (Deep Space Climate Observatory) satellite from its orbit, about a million and a half kilometers (about 930,000 miles) from the planet. This mission, jointly managed by NASA, NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) and U.S. Air Force, has its main aim in monitoring solar wind but it also takes pictures of the Earth.

The DSCOVR satellite was launched on February 11, 2015 but it took almost four months for it to reach the area called L1, where the gravity of the Earth and the Sun are balanced. After the testing phase, DSCOVR began its primary mission that will last two and a half years and it was possible to start collecting the photographs of Earth sent from its EPIC (Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera) instrument.

The photographs taken by the DSCOVR satellite won’t be put online in real time. Every day, NASA will put on the dedicated website the photographs received from 12 to 36 hours earlier with various details. The sequences of daily images will allow to see the Earth spinning and therefore the whole planet’s surface. The website is also equipped with search functions to find images in the archive from a certain day but also those of a certain continent.

The Earth is very bright in the darkness of space, therefore the exposure times of the images are very short, between 20 and 100 milliseconds. The consequence is that the stars in the background are invisible because their light is too dim to be captured in the photographs. Each color image put on the site is the result of the combination of three images taken using red, green and blue filters.

The photographs taken from the DSCOVR satellite will also be used for very practical purposes in scientific research and to contribute to an archive of long-term data on the planet. The new website is also the culmination of Al Gore’s project and gives everybody the chance to see the planet Earth as one single entity without artificial boundaries.