You need to upgrade your Flash Player The theme of this blog is not only and obviously space, but in particular “terrestrial worlds”, places that tend to have surfaces on which one could walk or at least attach oneself to. These places sometimes also have other earth-like familiar features such as atmospheres, weather, volcanos, geysers and perhaps, we are finding, even exotic oceans, rivers or lakes that are not necessarily made of familiar materials we are used to here at home. The second theme is imagery. Occasionally I do some retouching of images when needed if an image is incomplete or sometimes “dirty” or noisy. I will attempt to correct image shortcomings based upon other images or well-accepted presumed attributes. When this is done, notes will be offered as to what was added, why and sometimes how it was done. This way no one should ever wonder if something they are looking at is real or photoshop.
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Earth and Moon Seen from Mars

Earth and Moon from MRO in Mars Orbit

This is an image of Earth and the moon acquired by the HiRISE camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter which is in orbit around Mars. The distance from MRO to Earth at the time the image was taken was 142 million kilometers (88 million miles). Hard to image such details could be drawn out in an image taken from such a distance as that.

A similar image of Jupiter was also acquired by MRO some months ago.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 18th, 2008 at 5:17 pm and is filed under Earth, Luna (Moon). You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Earth and Moon Seen from Mars”

  1. Gordan Says:
    March 19th, 2008 at 9:14 am

    We’ve seen similar shots of Mars taken from amateur telescopes here on Earth, why would it be hard to imagine a telescope at Mars, without atmospheric blurring, could produce a similar result?

    I’m puzzled by this reaction, it’s as though people imagine Mars-to-Earth distance is somehow larger than Earth-to-Mars distance? I think that might be just the “That’s us!” factor that plays with one’s sense of perspective and distance.

  2. thomas Says:
    March 19th, 2008 at 10:36 am

    it is really just the idea that a small probe orbiting another planet which was designed to take images of a place much closer to it can see something so far away with such clarity. i suppose you are right, if i were in orbit around mars with a telescope in hand… it would be no surprise to see such a vision through the eye-piece of even a mediocre instrument.

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