I couldn’t write the When Worlds Collide column this week. Instead, here is a news feature I wrote for Ceylon Today, published on Sunday 16 Dec 2012:

It helps to take a look at the bigger picture once in a while. Today’s modern space and imaging technologies allow us to explore the biggest picture possible – at a planetary level.

Images of our Earth from space have been available for around 40 years. The first images that emerged from early space missions in the 1960s – showing a blue marble hanging in the darkness of space – energized the environmental movement worldwide.

But as technology advances, that vantage view keeps getting better.

Earlier this month, the US space agency NASA released a series of new images that offer an unprecedented new look at our planet at night.

A global composite image, constructed using cloud-free night images from a new…