This Earth video created by James Tyrwhitt-Drake using footage from the Elektro-L weather satellite—a Russian satellite that takes one 121 megapixel image of Earth every 30 minutes—is the highest resolution video of our home planet ever created. Watch it in all its 4K glory here.
A timelapse of Earth in 4K resolution, as imaged by the geostationary Elektro-L weather satellite, from May 15th to May 19th, 2011. Elektro-L is located ~40,000 km above the Indian ocean, and it orbits at a speed that causes it to remain over the same spot as the Earth rotates. The satellite creates a 121 megapixel image (11136x11136 pixels) every 30 minutes with visible and infrared light wavelengths. The images were edited to adjust levels and change the infrared channel from orange to green to show vegetation more naturally. The images were resized by 50%, misalignments between frames were manually corrected, and image artifacts that occurred when the camera was facing towards the sun were partially corrected. The images were interpolated by a factor of 20 to create a smooth animation. The animation was rendered in the Youtube 4K UHD resolution of 3840x2160. An original animation file with a resolution of (5568x5568) is available on request.