By Alan Boyle

NASA has taken the wraps off a 3.2-gigapixel "Global Selfie" that was built from 36,422 images shared on social media one month ago, for Earth Day.

The space agency says more than 50,000 pictures from 113 countries and regions around the world were posted on or around April 22, using the #globalselfie hashtag on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Google+ and Flickr. Those pictures were curated and processed to blend into two hemispheres' worth of Earth Day imagery from the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite on the Suomi NPP satellite.

A full-resolution version of the Global Selfie is hosted on the Web by GigaPan, and if you zoom in far enough, you can look into the smiling faces of all the folks who contributed to the planetary picture. Want to see another world-spanning selfie? Check out last year's "Wave at Saturn" mosaic.

Zoom in far enough and you can see the individual Earth Day selfies that were combined to produce NASA's monster "Global Selfie."

First published May 22 2014, 10:03 AM

Alan Boyle is the science editor for NBC News Digital. He joined MSNBC.com at its inception in July 1996, and took on the science role in July 1997 with the landing of NASA's Mars Pathfinder probe. Boyle is responsible for coverage of science and space for NBCNews.com.

Boyle joined NBCNews.com from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, where he was the foreign desk editor from 1987 to 1996. Boyle has won awards for science journalism from numerous organizations, including the National Academies, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the National Association of Science Writers. Boyle is the author of "The Case for Pluto: How a Little Planet Made a Big Difference." He lives in Bellevue, Wash.

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NASA Unveils the 'Global Selfie' We Made on Earth Day