In other words, rendered in simple English, NASA is saying that the 2002 “Blue Marble II” is not a photo. Instead, the image is a COMBINATION and COMPOSITE of many “satellite-based observations” (whatever that means), which were “stitched together” (whatever that means) by scientists and “visualizers” (whatever that means).

In other words, Blue Marble II is a fake — which would explain the duplicate clouds.

Here’s an admission by Robert Simmon, one of the “visualizers” who “stitched together” Blue Marble II, as related by David Yanofsky in his March 27, 2014 article for Quartz, “The guy who created the iPhone’s Earth image explains why he needed to fake it“:

As it turns out, much of what one might assume about this beautiful image is not true…. It isn’t actually a photograph of earth. And that blackness surrounding it? That’s not space, either….

Simmon, a data-visualizer and designer at NASA’s Earth Observatory, created the image in 2002. He told Quartz it’s not a photograph, but a sophisticated visualization. 

Images of the earth may seem commonplace, but there are actually very few pictures of the entire planet. The problem, Simmon said, is all the NASA earth-observing satellites are in low-earth or geostationary orbit, meaning none of them are far enough away to see a full hemisphere. The most familiar pictures of the entire Earth are from the 1960s and 1970s Apollo missions to the moon.

As realistic as it looks, the image is a composite of four months of light data collected in 2,300 km (1,429 mi) wide bands as NASA’s Terra satellite orbited from pole to pole, and the earth rotated beneath it.

That data was then stitched together and applied to the surface of a digital ball, then modified in Photoshop.

Simmon readily admits there are numerous fakeries in his image. The atmosphere is Photoshop blur. Some of the clouds are collaged together using Photoshop’s clone tool to cover gaps in the satellite’s coverage. The black area around the earth is not the void of space. It is simply a background of black color that Simmon placed the earth on top of. (This is standard practice, Simmon says: most actual “photographs” of the earth—including the Apollo images—present the planet on a black background).

Without these alterations, the image wouldn’t look very earth-like. Simmon said he based his manipulations on reality, “in the sense that I’ve looked at a lot of imagery to see how thick should that be, how blue should that be.” But, he later added, “It’s more hyper-realistic than realistic.”

“Without these alterations, the image wouldn’t look very earth-like.”

That’s a doozy of a sentence, because our visual images of earth all came from NASA in the first place as none of us has flown into space to actually see the entire Earth.

Given the admission that Blue Marble II is a fake, we have every reason to wonder about other NASA fakeries and lies, such as the 1986 Challenger explosion (see “Are the crew members of 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger still alive?”) and whether those photos taken on the Moon are real.