There she is, Planet Earth. Isn't she beautiful?

It's Earth Day, that day dedicated to celebrating and contemplating the beauty, fragility, health and get-your-hands-dirty earthiness of our fair planet.

Like any other holiday – much less one founded just two generations ago by hippies – Earth Day has its share of grinches, complaining about eco-sanctimony and whining that it hasn't solved the world's problems. (Isn't Christmas terrible? All those gifts, and we still have war!) And then there's the slightly confused hangers-on: did you know that Major League Baseball "has spent more than a century largely bracing against and defying Mother Nature, working alongside her in a kind of groundskeeping pact"?

But for those of us who don't need to deal with Earth Day through a lens of politics or public relations, it's a handy moment to make the world slightly nicer – what's so hard about picking up some trash and taking a shorter shower? – and go for a walk in the park. This alone won't save the world, but that's not the point. And in that spirit, I'd like to present my favorite images from Earth as Art, a treasury of satellite images selected by NASA and the United States

Geological Survey "for their aesthetic beauty, rather than for scientific value."

This is our planet. It's gorgeous.

Atlas Mountains

Chilean Volcanoes

Great Salt Desert

Edrengiyn Nuruu

Ganges River Delta

Lena Delta

Yellowknife Wetlands

Alluvial Fan

Andes

Jordan

Kamchatka Peninsula

Niger River

The Syrian Desert

Himalayas

Note: The high-resolution links from the original pages are truly high-resolution. Perfect for large computer screens or prints. And please feel free to share links to your own favorite satellite images!*

See Also:

WiSci 2.0: Brandon Keim's Twitter and Del.icio.us feeds; Wired Science on Facebook.