The ESA spacecraft Rosetta swings past the Earth in a few hours, but look at what it did when it was still 630,000 km (400,000 miles) from home:
Sigh. So lovely.
Rosetta took an image every hour for 24 hours; they’re making a movie which will be online soon. That should be spectacular!
The instant I saw the avalanche image from the HiRISE camera on-board MRO orbiting Mars, I knew I would have a contender for my Top Ten Astronomy Pictures of 2008.
But then they released this one at the same time:
Yeah, that’s us. That’s home. We were 192 million kilometers (115 million miles) from Mars when HiRISE turned around and took this picture. Right away I could tell that was South America’s west coastline… which is incredible. I also was just starting to wonder about the Moon in the image when I read that it had been brightened artificially to make it easier to see; in general the Earth is 3-4 times more reflective than the Moon, so it’s a lot brighter.
The Mars-Earth-Sun angle was just about 90 degrees when this was taken, which is why the Earth and Moon are half-full. Note that in reality, the Moon is about 30 Earth-diameters away from the Earth, so we’re seeing some perspective here. The Moon was a day before third quarter when this was taken, so it was actually a bit closer to Mars than the Earth was when HiRISE snapped this picture.
Beautiful.
If you went to BadAstronomy.com and found yourself here, never fear: the BA Blog has moved to its new home at Discover Blogs. The original BA site (with the Moon Hoax debunking and all that) is still online, too.
Phil Plait, the creator of Bad Astronomy, is an astronomer, lecturer, and author. After ten years working on Hubble Space Telescope and six more working on astronomy education, he struck out on his own as a writer. He has written two books, dozens of magazine articles, and 12 bazillion blog articles. He is a skeptic, and fights misuses of science as well as praising the wonder of real science.
Contact me: The Bad Astronomer "at" gmail "dot" com
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