NASA unveils photo of global selfie with more than 36,000 pictures from Earth Day

NASA has unveiled the world’s first interactive global selfie with more than 36,000 pictures of people. Zoom in. Can you see yourself or a friend?

This image released May 22, 2014 by NASA shows the “Global Selfie” Earth mosaic containing more than 36,000 individual photographs from the more than 50,000 images posted around the world on Earth Day, April 22, 2014. For Earth Day this year, NASA invited people around the world to step outside to take a "selfie" and share it with the world on social media. NASA released Thursday a new view of our home planet created entirely from those photos.The "Global Selfie" mosaic was built using more than 36,000 individual photographs drawn from the more than 50,000 images tagged #GlobalSelfie and posted on or around Earth Day, April 22, on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Google+ and Flickr. The project was designed to encourage environmental awareness and recognize the agency's ongoing work to protect our home planet. Selfies were posted by people on every continent and 113 countries and regions, from Antarctica to Yemen, Greenland to Guatemala, and Pakistan to Peru. The resulting global mosaic is a zoomable 3.2-gigapixel image that users can scan and explore to look at individual photos. The Global Selfie was assembled after several weeks of collecting and curating the submitted images. AFP PHOTO / HANDOUT / NASA == RESTRICTED TO EDITORIAL USE / MANDATORY CREDIT: "AFP PHOTO HANDOUT-NASA"/ NO MARKETING - NO ADVERTISING CAMPAIGNS – NO A LA CARTE SALES / DISTRIBUTED AS A SERVICE TO CLIENTS ==

JUST when you thought you had seen every selfie, NASA has unveiled an interactive global selfie featuring more than 36,000 pictures of people worldwide.

Inspired by Earth Day, NASA put a call out on social media with the simple question:

“Where are you on Earth Right Now?”

The space agency was inundated with photographs from more than 100 countries, which were used to create the final interactive image.

The image was created by using 36,422 individual photos from social media platforms including Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Google+ and Flickr.

Each photo was tagged with #globalselfie this year, and can be found when one zooms into

the 3.2-gigapixel image hosted online by GigaPan.

GigaPan states that the image is a mosaic, which reflects how the Earth would have appeared from space on Earth Day.

“The goal was to use each picture as a pixel in the creation of a “Global Selfie” — a mosaic image that would look like Earth appeared from space on Earth Day,” the website states.

“From Antarctica to Yemen, Greenland to Guatemala, Micronesia to the Maldives, Pakistan, Poland, Peru — and on.

“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.”

Use your mouse to zoom in and out of this interactive image below to see whose photo made it onto NASA’s global selfie.

TITLE: NASA global selfie SIZE: 640x480px SCROLLING: no

Originally published as NASA unveils photo of global selfie with more than 36,000 pictures from Earth Day