Show this movie to your "non-spacy" friends

Posted by Emily Lakdawalla

2008/07/17 08:50 CDT

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The Deep Impact extended mission, EPOXI, just released an amazing movie (Quicktime format, 1 MB) of the Moon transiting Earth, taken from 50 million kilometers away (or very roughly 150 times the distance from Earth to the Moon). You see Earth spinning away, and then from the left of the frame the Moon comes in to view and flies across Earth's disk. This movie makes obvious the albedo difference between Earth and the Moon -- the surfaces of both worlds have similar colors, but Earth is covered about 50% by highly reflective clouds, which makes it way brighter.

I don't think I'll ever get tired of looking at Earth from space. All the worlds of our solar system are fascinating, but our own planet has a unique beauty that nothing else in the solar system can match.

NASA/JPL-Caltech/UMD/GSFC

The Earth and Moon, from Deep Impact

This image of the Earth and Moon was taken by Deep Impact on May 29, 2008 from a distance of 49,367,340 kilometers (30,675,43 miles). The image was taken with three filters -- blue, green, and orange. It is one frame from a long movie, which you can download here (Quicktime format, 1 MB).