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NASA is inviting people to participate in a global selfie on Earth Day (that's today,April 22). The space agency has requested people around the world to take pictures of themselves outside on April 22 and upload them to social media using the hastag #GlobalSelfie. 

NASA will assemble the images into a global mosaic, with pictures placed by location. For addition to the crowdsourced image, NASA will consider images posted on five social media sites - Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Flickr and Google+. 

"NASA will celebrate the 44th anniversary of Earth Day with a variety of live and online activities April 21-27 to engage the public in the agency's mission to better understand and protect our home planet," agency officials wrote in a statement, according to Space.com.

"This year, for the first time in more than a decade, five NASA Earth Science missions will be launched into space in the same year. These new missions will help address some of the critical challenges facing our planet today and in the future: climate change, sea level rise, access to freshwater resources, and extreme weather events."

The patchwork picture of all participants, including video will be available in May, informed NASA.

 "This satellite data helps NASA scientists piece together a clear picture of our planet from a scientific viewpoint. On this Earth Day, we wanted to create a different picture of our planet -- a crowd-sourced collection of snapshots of the people of Earth that we could use to create one unique mosaic of the Blue Marble," NASA wrote in a statement announcing the event.

"Get outside and show us mountains, parks, the sky, rivers, lakes -- wherever you are, there's your picture. Tell us where you are in a sign, words written in the sand, spelled out with rocks -- or by using the printable signs we've created," NASA advised the public. 

You can also use forms that are available on the Global Selfie Website. 

Readers expressed mixed feelings regarding the initiative. 

"How cool--what a nice way to show that we're all interconnected (whether we like it or not)," commented a reader on Washington Post.