1,000 People Pose for a Delightful Group Photo Snapped From Space
The European Space Agency fittingly used a satellite for a group portrait.
The pyramids, the Grand Canyon and about 1,000 employees of the European Space Agency -- these are all things that can be seen from space.
On Friday, ESA shared a captivating group photo snapped by an Earth-watching satellite located 435 miles (700 kilometers) up in orbit.
Here's a close-cropped version of the ESA group portrait taken from space.
A Pleiades Neo satellite captured the image on Wednesday during an ESA gathering at the European Space Research and Technology Centre in the Netherlands. It was during a "day of games and activities intended to welcome people back to working on site after the two-year COVID-19 pandemic."
It took some coordination to pull off the massive portrait, which had to be timed for the satellite passing over. The employees gathered in the shape of the ESA logo on a rugby field and held up white pieces of paper of their heads. The letters were marked out ahead of time. A making-of video shows how everyone got into place.
👍 Fulfilling Europe’s space ambitions is a special kind of teamwork, combining different Member States, skills, agency activities and industry. These are just some of the people who make ESA, gathered at #ESTEC in the Netherlands 😎👉 https://t.co/QExFXoNmD1 pic.twitter.com/Vg6xNhu5rM
— ESA (@esa) June 24, 2022
The people in the image represent a considerable chunk of the ESA workforce, which includes about 2,200 staff. The satellite view ups the ante for any organization that wants to shoot a novel group photo. Your move, NASA.