This Is a Collage of Selfies!

Although selfies are now more commonplace than pictures of kittens and GIFs of Jennifer Lawrence, NASA just released their own take on the trend, and it stands out from the rest. The NASA "global selfie" mosaic is the result of an Earth Day initiative, in which they asked people all over the world to upload pictures of themselves tagged with #GlobalSelfie. Over the past few weeks, they received over 50,000 submissions, and they finally released the finished product this week.

The participants hail from every continent (yes, including Antarctica), and represent 113 countries/regions, such as Yemen, the Maldives, Micronesia, Guatemala, and Greenland. They uploaded their photos to a variety of social media sites, including Facebook, Flickr, Instagram, Google+, and Twitter. To form a complete image, the pictures were blended with satellite data from the Suomi NPP, which Slate says is probably the best weather satellite out there.

According to Peg Luce, the deputy director of NASA's Earth Science division, NASA was overjoyed by the enormous response they got. "We're very grateful that people took the time to celebrate our home planet together," she said. The selfie is also meant to draw attention to NASA's upcoming missions: it's launching five this year (the most in a decade) in order to gather more information about Earth.

NASA also released a gorgeous video a few weeks ago that highlights the geographic diversity of the images. (Although a lot of the people in it don't look like they're actually taking selfies, in the strict sense of the word...but hey, it's all about the spirit of the thing, right?