In a time when humanity has the means to procure almost unnaturally crisp images of the cosmos — from high-definition planetary portraits to massive deep space mosaics — there is something about the European Space Agency's new view of Earth that really gets me. It's blurry, the colors look kind of wrong, the planet isn't centered, half of the whole thing is shadowed, and honestly, it appears as though someone from the early 2000's took it with a flip phone.
Part of the allure is of course the fact that this image, according to ESA, was captured with a camera about the size of a coin's edge aboard a satellite made of three also-very-miniature boxes. The satellite is called TRISAT-R, and as the mission's project manager Iztok Kramberger said in the image's announcement, "this tiny camera measuring less than two cubic millimeters in size took a picture of an object measuring approximately one trillion cubic kilometers — our beautiful planet Earth — from thousands of kilometers away."
