Earth at Your Fingertips – Free eBook

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UPDATE: ESA has now released “Earth from Space: The Living Beauty” as a download from iTunes as a iBook.  

The European Space Agency (ESA) has released a free 100 page ebook for iOS users.  The book, entitled, “Earth from Space: the Living Beauty” contains over 100 pages and includes interactive maps, satellite imagery collected from ESA’s missions, and animations demonstrating various aspects of the world.

The aim of the book is to teach users about the earth while showcasing how data collected from satellites helps researchers further their understanding about the world.  Each chapter in the book is focused on a specific area of global studies.  The Solid Earth chapter takes a look at the earth’s crust, core, magnetic field, and mantle.  The Oceans section looks at marine life, man’s interaction with the earth’s large bodies of water, salinity, and deep sea life.  The chapter on Atmosophere includes a section on climatology as well as the ozone layer.  The Cryosophere looks at ice levels in Antarctica, the Arctic, and glaciers.  The Land chapter includes an animation of the ash plume from Eyjafjallajoekull’s eruption in Iceland.  The final chapter takes a look at some of the more remote areas of the world including deserts and rain forests.

The book also includes an image gallery.  ESA has a weekly series also entitled “Earth from Space” which includes an image of the week and a weekly video as part of the space agency’s earth observation outreach.

Earth from Space is currently only in iBook compatible format and users can access the ebook by clicking this download link.  The book is a little over 432 mbytes in size.  The ebook will also be made available through iTunes soon.

Some screenshots from ESA’s ebook, “Earth from Space: the Living Beauty“:

The European Space Agency has previsouly released an app entitled ESA App V2 which allowed users access to near real-time latest satellite imagery from Envisat, the ten year old earth observation satellite that unfortunately malfunctioned in April of 2012.  In January of this year, ESA also released CryoSatApp which provides users with the Cryosat-2 satellite which collects ice related data.