NASA Unveils its Earth Day Global Selfie (VIDEO)

On Earth Day this year (April 22), NASA asked people worldwide to celebrate by sending in a selfie so that they could create a composite mosaic of Earth - and NASA has finally unveiled its final product.

Entitled "Global Selfie," the 3.2-gigapixel image was built from 36,422 individual photos that were posted on social media and tagged #globalselfie on or around April 22, 2014. People on every continent - 113 countries and regions in all - posted their selfies, according to NASA's news release.

The simple question "Where are you on Earth Right Now?" triggered an influx of more than 50,000 #globalselfie submissions - not all were accessible or usable - from Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Google+ and Flickr.

The space agency spent weeks sifting through all of them to come up with the existing zoomable image - hosted on the Web by GigaPan.

Those pictures were curated and processed to blend into two hemispheres' worth of Earth Day imagery from the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite instrument - located on the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership satellite, a joint NOAA-NASA mission. Any diagonal stripes seen in the mosaic are due to the satellite capturing the reflection of sunlight off ocean waters, NASA notes.

The social media event was not simply a celebration of our planet, but a promotional event as well. NASA boasts of 17 Earth-observing satellites currently in orbit, and the fact that 2014 is a significant year for the space agency - for the first time in more than a decade, five missions designed to gather critical data about Earth are launching to space this year.

The Global Precipitation Measurement mission's Core Observatory, the first of NASA's 2014 missions, launched in February. Up next is the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2), launching from California's Vandenberg Air Force Base on July 1.

A full-resolution version of the Global Selfie can be seen on GigaPan's website. If you look close enough, you might even be able to find yourself.