[PHOTO] Two pictures of the Earth
Aug. 13th, 2010 08:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldPictures of the Earth from space are fantastic. ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
springheel_jack reminded me of that in a post that he made earlier today, posting his two favourite Earth pictures, and, well, who am I to ignore a good thing?
The Planetary Society has an archive of Earth images, taken by missions as various as Lunar Orbiter 1 in 1966 to Chandrayaan-1 in 2008. Excluding "The Blue Marble", the famous photograph taken of the Earth by the Apollo 17 crew in 1992 with a sere Africa tilted up at the camera amidst oceans, my two favourite photos are the ones below.
Taken from the Wikimedia Commons here, this image of the Earth and the Moon was snapped by the "Mars Orbiter Camera of [the] Mars Global Surveyor on May 8 2003 at 12:59:58 UTC. South America is visible."
At the time, the Earth-Moon system was more than 139 million kilometres away from Mars, the Earth being a few hundred thousand kilometres closer to Mars than the Moon. A bit more than 43% of the disks of both worlds is illuminated.
"This corresponds to what an observer with a telescope would see from Mars; a naked-eye observer would simply see a single point of light. Usually, the Earth and Moon are visible as two separate points of light, but at this point in the Moon's orbit they are too close to resolve with the naked eye as seen from Mars."
Taken from the Wikimedia Commons here, the famous "Pale Blue Dot" image of the Earth was taken in 1990 as "part of the first ever ‘portrait’ of the solar system taken by Voyager 1. The spacecraft acquired a total of 60 frames for a mosaic of the solar system from a distance of more than 4 billion miles from Earth and about 32 degrees above the ecliptic. From Voyager's great distance Earth is a mere point of light, less than the size of a picture element even in the narrow-angle camera. Earth was a crescent only 0.12 pixel in size. Coincidentally, Earth lies right in the center of one of the scattered light rays resulting from taking the image so close to the sun.."
These two images, taken from such immense distances, are tremendously evocative for me. The first photo is comparable to the very best resolution that our pre-space probe telescopes were capable of, looking not very different from a 1950s picture of Mars. The second photo, with its Earth occupying a fraction of a pixel, might well be the way that our world would look like from immense, immense distances. Both photos show how very small our world is. As science, they're interesting; as art, they're great.
springheel_jack reminded me of that in a post that he made earlier today, posting his two favourite Earth pictures, and, well, who am I to ignore a good thing?The Planetary Society has an archive of Earth images, taken by missions as various as Lunar Orbiter 1 in 1966 to Chandrayaan-1 in 2008. Excluding "The Blue Marble", the famous photograph taken of the Earth by the Apollo 17 crew in 1992 with a sere Africa tilted up at the camera amidst oceans, my two favourite photos are the ones below.
Taken from the Wikimedia Commons here, this image of the Earth and the Moon was snapped by the "Mars Orbiter Camera of [the] Mars Global Surveyor on May 8 2003 at 12:59:58 UTC. South America is visible."
At the time, the Earth-Moon system was more than 139 million kilometres away from Mars, the Earth being a few hundred thousand kilometres closer to Mars than the Moon. A bit more than 43% of the disks of both worlds is illuminated.
"This corresponds to what an observer with a telescope would see from Mars; a naked-eye observer would simply see a single point of light. Usually, the Earth and Moon are visible as two separate points of light, but at this point in the Moon's orbit they are too close to resolve with the naked eye as seen from Mars."
Taken from the Wikimedia Commons here, the famous "Pale Blue Dot" image of the Earth was taken in 1990 as "part of the first ever ‘portrait’ of the solar system taken by Voyager 1. The spacecraft acquired a total of 60 frames for a mosaic of the solar system from a distance of more than 4 billion miles from Earth and about 32 degrees above the ecliptic. From Voyager's great distance Earth is a mere point of light, less than the size of a picture element even in the narrow-angle camera. Earth was a crescent only 0.12 pixel in size. Coincidentally, Earth lies right in the center of one of the scattered light rays resulting from taking the image so close to the sun.."
These two images, taken from such immense distances, are tremendously evocative for me. The first photo is comparable to the very best resolution that our pre-space probe telescopes were capable of, looking not very different from a 1950s picture of Mars. The second photo, with its Earth occupying a fraction of a pixel, might well be the way that our world would look like from immense, immense distances. Both photos show how very small our world is. As science, they're interesting; as art, they're great.
