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Earth and the Moon as Seen From Mars

posted by on Wednesday January 11 2017, @12:44PM   Printer-friendly
from the enhance! dept.

takyon writes:

From JPL comes this view of Earth from afar:

This composite image of Earth and its moon, as seen from Mars, combines the best Earth image with the best moon image from four sets of images acquired on Nov. 20, 2016, by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

Each was separately processed prior to combining them so that the moon is bright enough to see. The moon is much darker than Earth and would barely be visible at the same brightness scale as Earth. The combined view retains the correct sizes and positions of the two bodies relative to each other.

HiRISE takes images in three wavelength bands: infrared, red, and blue-green. These are displayed here as red, green, and blue, respectively. This is similar to Landsat images in which vegetation appears red. The reddish feature in the middle of the Earth image is Australia. Southeast Asia appears as the reddish area (due to vegetation) near the top; Antarctica is the bright blob at bottom-left. Other bright areas are clouds.

Composite image?! It's NASA trickery!

Also at Space.com. Compare with the Pale Blue Dot and The Day the Earth Smiled.

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 11 2017, @04:48PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 11 2017, @04:48PM (#452554)

    Wait ~2 weeks and the Moon will be between Earth and Mars -- a photo taken then should do some of what you want. You've got 2 weeks to lobby the powers-that-be at JPL...!

    If you really want the full "back side of the Moon", fully lit by Sol, then it seems like there are two choices? An image from an inner planet satellite, looking radially away from the Sun. Or an image taken from Mars (etc) that waits until Earth-Moon are nearly on the other side of the Sun. This will be difficult because the Sun in the middle needs to be shaded somehow...

  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 11 2017, @09:05PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 11 2017, @09:05PM (#452690)

    Or, you just look up the billions of images and maps made from the imagery from every imaging craft [washingtonpost.com] to have gone around the Moon from 1960 onwards.