Earth can look pretty rancid from our urban locations – smog, litter, ugly buildings and urban decay have a lot to answer for.  It’s easy to forget just how much beauty is all around us, from vivid sunsets to our national parks, but it all pales to nothing when we look at the planet as a whole.  In 1968, the crew of Apollo 17 looked back at Earth and took an iconic photo, which was named “The Blue Marble”, showing Earth in it’s entirety.  That photo inspired millions with it’s serene beauty, it’s lack of political and ethnic divisions and its stability.  Recently the Goddard Space Flight Centre released a new series of Blue Marble images, built up from composite imagery captured by the MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) satellite.  High resolution images taken over many days were stacked together to bring out much detail that would otherwise have been hidden by clouds.  For more of these pictures, check out their Flickr account.