Never before the earth looked so glowing, so fascinating, so breathtaking..! ( we can surely put thousands of other suitable adjectives as well for this magnificent sight).  OK , enough of rambling , now the real buzz  is, the United States space agency NASA has published some stunning pictures of our planet which were taken by a newly launched NASA-NOAA satellite equipped with a sensor to observe the planet at night.

The hi-tech sensor, the day-night band of the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS), is sensitive enough to detect the nocturnal glow produced by Earth's atmosphere and the light from a single ship in the sea. Unlike a camera that captures a picture in one exposure, the day-night band produces an image by repeatedly scanning a scene and resolving it as millions of individual pixels.

The satellite captured the glow from natural sources including moonlight, northern lights and naturally-occurring fires making the pictures look astonishingly brilliant. It has also photographed hurricane sandy while rotating over earth's orbit during the time of the natural calamity.

"For all the reasons that we need to see Earth during the day, we also need to see Earth at night," said Steve Miller, a researcher at NOAA's Colorado State University Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere. "Unlike humans, the Earth never sleeps," he added.

If someone becomes too enthusiastic to compare the photos with other visual treats then metaphorically  it can be compared only with famous Dutch painter Vincent Ven Gogh's masterpiece 'Starry Nights' as the feel, details, body of work, colors and brilliance are the common factors in both the 'phenomenon'

(With inputs)

(AW-Jyotishman)