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I have seen countless images from space, taken from the Earth, above, and many spaceships at the target destination itself: the Moon, Venus, Mars, asteroids, comets, Jupiter, Saturn … the sight is always wonderful, and always on some poetic level.
But there is also something deeply profound about seeing Earth from space. Certainly from a low orbit where we can see a fraction of our planet, or from a higher orbit where maybe we see it as a disc, blue and green and white.
And then sometimes we see it from much further away, so far away that this vast world around us is reduced to a point, a pixel of light from a view a hundred times farther away than any human being has ever traveled. .
Here is such a point of view.
The Curiosity rover took this image on June 5, 2020, scanning the western horizon of Mars. It may not seem like much at first, just a grayscale mosaic of a few images of the drab Martian sky.
Look again. There is a pair of lights in this otherwise uncharacteristic sky, two unresolved sparks fighting the twilight gloaming. There is a weaker one towards the bottom, a lighter one towards the top.
The one at the bottom? Venus. The brightest? Earth. Home. Here.
When Curiosity took this photo, it was exploring a region of clay deposits on Mars, a particularly interesting target because clay is deposited by water and is a potential avenue for the development of life. You can also see a mound at the bottom, unofficially called Tower Butte, a sedimentary rock eroded by a billion years of thin Martian wind.
And yet, despite the heavy significance of all this possible geology and biology, our eyes are drawn to the worlds above. Earth was over 135 million kilometers from Mars when this image was taken, Venus maybe a little closer. I suspect that the dust in the air above the Martian surface has dampened Venus more than Earth, otherwise it should appear brighter in the image.
If you could zoom in enough, you would see the two planets as crescents, their smaller orbits bringing them closer to the Sun as seen from Mars. From Earth, Mars was a red glow in the sky rising after midnight. Now, months later, Venus and Earth have stoned Mars in their orbits, becoming morning stars in the eastern Martian sky before sunrise.
However, this means to our point of view as Mars approaches the Sun in our sky, a glowing red eye shining above the eastern horizon shortly after sunset. Venus rises before the sun in the morning, bright and white, one of the brightest natural objects in the sky.
How wonderful it is to be able to perceive this geometry, the actual positions of the planets not only in our sky but also in space and in their skies? I can imagine myself standing on Mars and facing west, seeing Earth above the local hills. Does it look blue or green? Or is the ubiquitous local dust changing color?
Is there anybody out there looking at the sky, seeing me?
Fantastic, certainly. But maybe not for long. I don’t intend to ever be on Mars, but somewhere right now someone on Earth is. And I bet they’re right.
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