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You may not have realised it, but the Earth has been taking selfies for a while now. Not in the way your phone might, but having gone thousands of years without humans being able to see what our own planet looks like, we've actually spent the last 60 years turning the lens back at our own planet, which we only recently learned looked like a fully lit blue ball hanging space.

Since, our planet is huge in size and its radius goes up to 6,371 km, the camera taking the planet-sized selfie has to be between 40,000 to a million km far away from Earth. In 1946, a rocket-launched camera provided us with a grainy black-and-white view of part of North America. Before this, the closest we had come to a picture of the Earth had been taken by the Explorer II balloon, which ascended 13.7 miles in 1935, high enough to discern the curvature of the Earth.

Since then we've gotten a lot better, with the satellites today providing images like this beautiful vision of the "dark side of the moon" as it comes between the Earth and the Sun.

The first colour and real image of Earth was taken by the ATS-III satellite in 1967 which was launched to study scientific, communications and meteorological issues. In 1968, the world got another glimpse of Earth from a distance after a NASA spacecraft took an image of half-lit earth during its orbit around the moon for Apollo 8 mission.

The first striking full-disk image of earth was taken in 1972 by an astronaut from the Apollo 17 mission. After this, a series of distant images of Earth were captured by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter from the Moon. Famously known as “Blue Marble” and “Black Marble” series, these pictures were taken from different locations in space, capturing stunning colours of Earth during different times of the day. This video from Scroll, using pictures from NASA and the European Space Agency, gives you an idea of what earth has looked like to us over the last six decades.