Photo by Roscosmos/NTSOMZ/SRC "Planeta"/zelenyikot.livejournal.com
The Earth is a tilted top, spinning at an angle (about 23 degrees) as it orbits the Sun. Because of this there are only two times a year when both hemispheres receive light from pole to pole: the equinoctes (the plural of “equinox”). These occur on or around March 22 (generally called the vernal equinox) and Sept. 22 (the autumnal equinox). At 05:30 UTC on Sep. 22, 2013—just hours before the actual moment of the equinox—the Russian weather satellite Elektro-L took the photo above, showing our evenly lit planet. You can see a typhoon off the coast of China, winds streaming east from southern Africa, the deep blue oceans, green vegetation (actually taken using an infrared camera, which highlights plants), and the brown deserts.
Journalist and space enthusiast Vitaliy Egorov put together a series of images taken from Sep. 20–21 to create the animation above, which shows the Earth in motion. The satellite orbits once every 24 hours, so the face of the Earth seems to stay still as the day/night line (called the terminator) sweeps across it—you can also see sunglint, the reflection of the Sun off of water, moving across the ocean as well. Our planet, when seen the right way, is mesmerizing.
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