This past Earth Day (April 22, 2014), NASA invited you – and everyone else on the planet – to take part in a worldwide celebration. They asked us to take pictures of ourselves wherever we were on Earth, then post to social media using the hashtag #GlobalSelfie. And here’s the result. It’s a 3.2 gigapixel global selfie composed of 36,422 individual images. NASA said:
People on every continent – 113 countries and regions in all – posted selfies. From Antarctica to Yemen, Greenland to Guatemala, Micronesia to the Maldives, Pakistan, Poland, Peru – and on. The image was assembled after weeks of curating more than 50,000 #globalselfie submissions – not all were accessible or usable – from Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Google+ and Flickr.
Deborah Byrd created the EarthSky radio series in 1991 and founded EarthSky.org in 1994. Prior to that, she had worked for the University of Texas McDonald Observatory since 1976, and created and produced their Star Date radio series. Today, she serves as Editor-in-Chief of this website. She has won a galaxy of awards from the broadcasting and science communities, including having an asteroid named 3505 Byrd in her honor. In 2020, she won the Education Prize from the American Astronomical Society, the largest organization of professional astronomers in North America. A science communicator and educator since 1976, Byrd believes in science as a force for good in the world and a vital tool for the 21st century. "Being an EarthSky editor is like hosting a big global party for cool nature-lovers," she says.
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