You're looking at one single massive picture of the entire eastern chunk of North America plus a bunch of the Caribbean, courtesy NASA's newest climate monitoring satellite, NPP. Next time a hurricane heads directly towards your house, this orbital eyeball will probably be the first to know.

NPP is, mercifully, an abbreviation for NPOESSPP, which itself is an abbreviation for National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System Preparatory Project. It's part of NOAA's JPSS program as well as the international SARSAT program, and features such instruments as VIIRS, CrIS, CERES, ATMS, OMPS, and &mdash okay, you know what, let's just move on, I'm all acronymed out.

While this camera on this satellite (a 556 pound monstrosity which collects 22 channels of visible and infrared light) can't quite read newspapers from orbit, it does have a fairly high resolution, at least considering it's absolutely astounding field of view. Check out the 6000px x 6000px full-size image below, in which you can see all the way from the icy wasteland of Canada to the northern tip of South America:

The job of this thing is to sit out there and try to figure out how badly we're wrecking our planet with this whole global warming fiasco, and to give us timely weather forecasts. Oh, and for all the pretty pictures, that too.

NASA, via io9