I’ve seen countless images of space, taken from Earth, above it, and many of the spacecraft’s destinations: the Moon, Venus, Mars, asteroids, comets, Jupiter, Saturn … the view is always wonderful, and always some Poetic on the level.
But looking at the earth from space is also something profound. Certainly from lower orbit, where we can see part of our planet, or from higher orbit where we see it as disk, blue and green and white.
And then, sometimes, we’ve seen it from so far away, so far away that this vast world around us is reduced to a pixel of light, from a shore a hundred times farther away than a human being travels.
Such a look is here.
The Curiosity rover took this image on June 5, 2020, while looking at the western horizon of Mars. It doesn’t look like the first, just a grayscale mosaic of some images of the pale Martian sky.
See again. There are pairs of lights that in an otherwise featureless sky, two resolved sparks fight the gloom of the evening. There is a circle near the bottom, a bright one near the top.
The one below? Fri. Bright? Earth. Kher. Here.
When Curiosity took that shot it was exploring an area of clay deposits on Mars, a target of special interest because clay is poured through water, and is a potential pathway for life evolution. You can also see a butt at the bottom, unofficially called a tower butt, a silty stone cut from a billion-year-old thin Martian wind.
And yet, despite all the weighty meanings of geology and possible biology, our eyes are drawn to the world above. Earth was 135 million kilometers away from Mars when that image broke, Venus was probably a little closer. I suspect that the dust in the air on the Martian surface dulls Venus more than Earth, otherwise it should look brighter in the image.
If you can zoom in enough, you will see both planets as crescent-shaped, their small orbits seen from Mars taking them closer to the sun. From Earth, Mars had a red glitter in the rising sky after midnight. Now, months later, both Venus and Earth have orbited Mars, becoming morning stars in the eastern Mars sky before sunrise.
However, it does mean Our The view is that Mars is approaching the sun in our sky, a bright red eye shining over the eastern horizon long after sunset. Venus rose in the morning before the sun, shiny and white, one of the brightest natural things in heaven.
How beautiful it is that we can understand this geometry, the actual position of the planets not only in our sky but also in space, and Their Sky? I can imagine standing on Mars and looking west, looking at the earth over the local mountains. Does it look blue or green? Or can ubiquitous local dust change its color?
Is there anyone looking up at the sky, looking at me?
Imaginary, of course. But maybe not for long. I have no plans to ever be on Mars, but somewhere in the moment, someone on Earth does. And I bet they are right.
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