It's the 40th anniversary of Earth Day today. To honor our beloved planet, it's nice sometimes to stop and envy the view enjoyed by such a tiny slice of humanity: the astronauts. Here we've compiled some of our favorite views of Earth from space.
In addition to more conventional images taken from spacecraft and satellites, we've also included more data-rich visualizations of the sort that continue to help us understand our great planet.
Launch the gallery above for images of earthquakes, fires, sunsets, ice shelves and more. Happy Earth Day!
Five amazing, clean technologies that will set us free, in this month's energy-focused issue. Also: how to build a better bomb detector, the robotic toys that are raising your children, a human catapult, the world's smallest arcade, and much more.


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I really hope that human kind will realize how beautiful our planet is, and learn to live with it in harmony...
Ivan Malagurski