Although the majority of the world’s inhabitants accepted it was a big ball spinning in space many years ago, it’s rare we actually get to see the Earth for the vast, living mass of energy that it is. Still images of the planet are all very well, but, they never capture the sense of its moving, its breathing, its billions of inhabitants.

Fortunately, we live in an age of video as well as rationality (well, most of us do, anyway) and thanks to NASA, this stunning sequence of timelapse photography creates a genuine impression of what it must be like to orbit the globe and see the lights of cities, the ghostly auroras at the poles and – our personal favourite – the electric storms over the plains of Africa.

This is a genuinely moving piece of film, and it would be even more so if it hadn’t been soundtracked by Aled Jones. This is one of those rare occasions when you wish YouTube would be more stringent with its copyright measures. Recommendation: watch it with the volume off and select your own music to play over the top.