Selfie of the Day: NASA Releases the First Full Picture of Earth Since 1972

One of NASA's newest photographic satellite, with the express mission to continually monitor Earth, has come online and given us the first complete photo of our home planet in over 40 years

It's called Deep Space Climate Observatory or DSCOVR, and NASA boasted about the new stunning picture it provided.

On February 11, 2015, DSCOVR was finally lofted into space by a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. After journey of about 1.6 million kilometers (1 million miles) to the L1 Lagrange Point, the satellite and its Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC) has returned its first view of the entire sunlit side of Earth. At L1—four times farther than the orbit of the Moon—the gravitational pull of the Sun and Earth cancel out, providing a stable orbit and a continuous view of Earth. The image above was made by combining information from EPIC's red, green, and blue bands. (Bands are narrow regions of the electromagnetic spectrum to which a remote sensing instrument responds. When EPIC collects data, it takes a series of 10 images at different bands—from ultraviolet to near infrared.)

Now surely, you're thinking, "But I've seen many pictures of Earth that have been taken since 1972." Well, that's rude of you to interrupt, but NASA explained away your thoughts:

While NASA has released other blue marble images over the years, these have mostly been mosaics stitched together with image processing software—not a single view of Earth taken at one moment in time.

Yep, that's us! Right there! If you live in North, Central or the northern part of South America, you can probably see your house from there.