Unless you are an astronaut.. or a cosmonaut, you probably haven’t had a chance to see your Earth and Moon from this angle.
From NASA Earth Observatory. The green tinge is a photographic artifact produced by the method of taking the photo:
A NASA camera aboard the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) has captured a unique view of the Moon as it passed between the spacecraft and Earth. A series of test images shows the fully illuminated “dark side” of the Moon that is not visible from Earth.
The images were acquired by NASA’s Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC), a four megapixel CCD camera and telescope on the DSCOVR satellite, which orbits about 1.6 million kilometers (1 million miles) from Earth. EPIC maintains a constant view of the fully illuminated Earth as it rotates, providing daily scientific observations of ozone, vegetation, cloud height, and airborne aerosols. About twice a year the camera will capture images of the Moon and Earth together as the orbit of DSCOVR crosses the orbital plane of the Moon.
The images shown above and in the movie below were taken over the course of five hours on July 16, 2015. The North Pole is toward the upper left, reflecting the orbital tilt of Earth from the vantage point of the spacecraft.
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Read the rest there.
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Thanks for posting this, Father. I never thought I’d get a chance to see even a photograph of the dark side of the moon. Now I have, thanks to NASA.
Fantastic and thanks.
I sent this post to my two grandsons. Thank you Father.
If you are the kind of person who likes this try:
Celestia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestia
http://www.shatters.net/celestia/
And you can arrange this kind of display whenever you want. Good for home schoolers too.
I have run it under both Linux and Windows. Should work find for Macs as well.
Obama tweeted the video. Nice to see something good from him.
(And, no, I don’t follow him on twitter, it was a retweet.)
Imagine how odd it would be as an alien living on the “dark side” of the moon, never having the foggiest inkling that the planet Earth was a mere quarter of a million miles away.
With a a bit of elbow grease and the picture overlay function of Google Earth, I was able to pin point, with some degree of accuracy, the location of my house on the photo. I put a nice big neon arrow pointing to it. A great souvenir!
“Unless you are an astronaut.. or a cosmonaut, you probably haven’t had a chance to see your Earth and Moon from this angle.”
As a matter of fact, no human has ever seen the earth and moon from that angle.
24 Apollo astronauts saw the earth from a somewhat similar angle, but 1/4 the distance. The moon, meanwhile, was a mere 60 miles beneath them (or in the case of the 12 who stepped foot on the moon, directly beneath their feet), and appeared as if it were far larger than the earth as a result.
Also, because they visited the moon only in daylight, the sun was never illuminated the full disc of both of them like in this photo from DSCOVR. The earth was generally about half enshrouded in the shadow of the night, like in the famous Earthrise photo Bill Anders took on Apollo 8.