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NASA asked. 56,000 votes decided.
In honor of the 50th anniversary of Earth Day and the 20th anniversary of NASA’s Earth Observatory, the space agency invited the public to vote on the best images that capture our beautiful planet in the Earth Observatory collection. (The Earth Observatory is a publishing medium where NASA shares images and other discoveries that come from its research.)
After five rounds of voting, the winner of the Tierra Tournament was announced on April 28.
The winning photo, taken in 2001 by Serge Andrefouet, a remote sensing specialist at the University of South Florida, captures sand and seaweed in the Bahamas using the Landsat 7 satellite. Tides and ocean currents created the patterns you can see on the image.
See the winner (and some of the other finalists) below.
WINNER! This year’s winning image was also a finalist in the tenth anniversary contest.
RUNNER-UP: Astronauts captured a volcanic plume at Raikoke Volcano, a volcano on the Kuril Islands that often does not erupt.
FINAL ROUND: Captured in Landsat 8, this image shows the transition from sand dunes to land in the Namib Desert of southern Africa.
FINAL ROUND: This image, a combination of artistic and scientific imagery, was made using data from satellite missions, with graphic artists creating global data layers for things like the Earth’s surface and sea ice sheets.
THIRD ROUND: On the International Space Station, astronauts captured “aurora austral” (the southern lights) with a digital camera while they were over the Indian Ocean.
THIRD ROUND: This, of course, is not an image of Earth at all. It’s an image of Saturn taken from the Cassini spacecraft, but the Earth Observatory liked it enough to include it. (Technically, you can see Earth in the upper left quadrant of Saturn’s rings.)
THIRD ROUND – One of a series of images documenting Alaska’s Columbia Glacier, this image tracks the glacier’s rapid retreat.
THIRD ROUND: Astronauts took a digital camera photo of Atafu Atoll, the smallest of the three atolls and an island that makes up the Tokelau Islands in the southern Pacific Ocean. (Atafu Atoll is about eight kilometers wide!)
Landsat 8 captured an ongoing eruption flowing in Iceland between the Bardarbunga and Askja volcanoes.
The image here captures the melting ice sheet on Eagle Island in Antarctica when it reached its highest temperature recorded in February.
A NASA camera at the Deep Space Climate Observatory caught the moon as it passed between the spacecraft and Earth.
With a new instrument available on the International Space Station since 2014, scientists now hope to observe some of the 4.3 million lightning strikes that occur daily. Here are just a few of them.
Taken from Voyager 1, this 1977 image shows Earth and the Moon together when Voyager 1 was only 7.25 million miles from Earth. (As of 2012, it was 11.31 billion miles from Earth.)
This image is a visualization of the solid particles and liquid droplets (called aerosols) found in ecosystems around the world in just one day: August 23, 2018.
This image of the Andaman Sea was captured by Landsat 8 which, thanks to the reflection of the Sun, makes the internal waves easily visible.
A tried and true favorite, this iconic 1968 photo was taken by the Apollo 8 crew while orbiting the Moon.
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