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Happy Monday: stare at a time-lapse video of the Earth’s surface

Happy Monday: stare at a time-lapse video of the Earth’s surface

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Earth is perhaps the biggest cosmic celebrity. Our planet gets its picture taken pretty frequently over the course of a single day, thanks to the efforts of the astronauts who are in orbit and numerous monitoring satellites. Now, the photos from one of those probes — the Japanese Himawari 8 satellite — have been strung together into a stunning 12-second video, giving us a peak at how one portion of the globe looks over a 24-hour period. And it's completely mesmerizing.

The video is on loop at a newly published website called glittering.blue, which was created by Charlie Loyd — a satellite imagery specialist at Mapbox. It showcases the western Pacific, Australia, and some bits of Asia, Antarctica, and Alaska during August 3rd, 2015. There was also an intense Category 5 typhoon that day, called Typhoon Soudelor, which can be seen near Earth's middle. Loyd has also provided an extremely thorough Question and Answer page, detailing the images that were used, how he created the video, and why everything looks the way it does. And if you were curious how you could use this video to convince everyone that Earth is actually round, Loyd has answer for that too — though he suggests spending your efforts elsewhere.