This is a photograph — meaning, it’s real — taken from 114 million miles away on the far side of the sun. The brightest little dot in the lower left is the earth. The less bright dot near it is our moon. Click on it: it almost makes you cry.The photo was taken by a spacecraft called Messenger. It left on its trip in August, 2004, heading in a circuitious manner toward Mercury. It’ll get there March 2011. It took the picture only because it’s looking for asteroid-y type things called vulcanoids that may or may not be orbiting between Mercury and the sun. The earth just happened to be in the field of view. Messenger didn’t find any vulcanoids yet. It’s such a courageous, persistent, plucky little spacecraft, navigating for so many years such black skies.
Photo credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington
I think I can see my house from up here!
Oh? Is it the one with the blue roof?
Nope, zoomed right in and I can’t see any insects …
Next up, Google Galaxy?
Tim, you know about Google Sky, right? http://www.google.com/sky/
And Galaxy Zoo at zooniverse.org?
WOW! — what an elegant posting … who knew we would get to a point of being able to take and share (see) photographs of the earth from this distance, and nearly take it for granted!?
You can’t even see our debt ceiling from Messenger. How nice! I hope this Messenger has a better fate than its predecessor, the runner across Marathon Plains to Athens in 431 B.C.