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While everybody’s attention might be fixed on the first photos of Mercury brought home by Messenger, I managed to come across the most amazing outer space photograph of the Earth I’ve been granted to witness so far. Yeah, it’s captioned above and I’d advice all of you to have a closer look by clicking on it. It’s not only that you can see beautifully contoured clouds, small lakes in India or the arab deserts in all its stunning devastating beauty in high resolution, but to me the whole photo seems to speak in the same manner a masterful painting does. Truly exquisite.

Credit for this extraordinary piece of photography goes to Russia’s new space craft, a new weather satellite called Elektro-L, now orbiting Earth on a geostationary orbit 36,000 kilometers above the equator, after being launched on January 20 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, on board a Zenit rocket.

[via Gizmodo]

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