This image was just released from NASA’s Curiosity rover on
Mars:
Clicking on the image will bring you to the Unvierse Today
article where you can continue to enlarge the image. Once you enlarge it, zoom in as far as you can and you will find
the following image (or something very similar to it):
The bluish-white dot is Earth, is “us”. The slightly grey
splotch beneath Earth is the Moon. Yes, our “large” satellite (in astronomy an
object that is gravitationally bound to and orbiting another, larger object is
referred to as a satellite). It really is just amazing if you think about it:
there is a man-made machine ON ANOTHER PLANET (!) that just took a picture of
us from space. For some reason that just blows my mind.
It reminded me of the image taken last summer by Cassini, the spacecraft orbiting Saturn:
This made me ponder about other images of Earth from space.
I dug this up from www.planetary.org:
The picture caption on the site states the following:
“This picture of a crescent-shaped Earth and Moon – the
first of its kind ever taken by a spacecraft – was recorded Sept. 18, 1977, by
Voyager 1 when it was 11.66 million kilometers (7.25 million miles) from Earth.
Image credit: NASA/JPL.”
We have come a long way since 1977, but it is still just as
beautiful and incredible to see and ponder about. When I talk with
non-astronomers about space, I always
try to emphasize just how vast it is; space sure seems large (and empty) in
these pictures.
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