NASA released an image of the earth and the moon in one picture, as seen from Mars. It was taken by the HiRISE Instrument on October 3rd, 2007.
On the Earth image we can make out the west coast outline of South America at lower right, although the clouds are the dominant features. These clouds are so bright, compared with the Moon, that they are saturated in the HiRISE images. In fact, the RED-filter image was almost completely saturated, the blue-green image had significant saturation, and the brightest clouds were saturated in the IR image. This color image required a fair amount of processing to make a nice-looking release.
“Nice-looking” is an understatement. http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/earthmoon.php -via Bad Astronomy Blog
(image credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona)
You would see that from Mars, kind of - if you were looking through a telescope. Look at the size of the moon, Mars is bigger than that and we still need a scope to make out any detail.
Its pretty awesome to get a good look at the distance from the earth to the moon - I knew the number (approx) but it doesn't sink in 'till you see it like that.
March 4th, 2008 at 10:07 pm
'I had the opening scene from the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey playing in my head the moment I saw this...'
I had Halo 3 adagio playing at the time. Sorta works too.
Of course, NASA would probably airbrush it out.
Silly NASA, don't they know we can handle the truth?