Emily Lakdawalla • Jul 17, 2008
Show this movie to your "non-spacy" friends
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.