Dizzying new photo from China's lunar probe.
This was taken yesterday by the Chinese space probe Chang'e 5:
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The Moon is probably in front of the Earth judging by the fact that Chang'e 5 is a lunar probe that recently swung by the Moon, but you can't really tell based on lighting - the Moon is naturally much darker than Earth.
I actually had a bit of vertigo when I first saw this image. That's how you know a space image is great - when you get dizzy the moment you realize it faithfully represents what your own eyes would see out a window. What we're seeing right there in this image is a secret - something human brains did not evolve to process. That's why it's slightly terrifying, and infinitely amazing.
I'm glad that China's space program (along with India's) is new enough at the space probe game that they still bother to take images like this instead of resigning their probes to abstruse scientific work and writing off such images as worthless PR stunts.
http://spaceref.com/onorbit/change-5-view-of-earth-and-the-moon.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
Very hard for Saturn to have the visceral impact of Earth unless you have a powerful enough imagination to put yourself in its context. It's like the embodiment of a mathematical concept.
Here's the Cassini photo archive, if anyone is wondering where to get those images:
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/targetFamily/Saturn?subselect=Target%3ASaturn%3A
My favorite:
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My point was that NASA has a ho-hum attitude about the Moon, Earth, and Mars (except for the surface), unless it's to highlight a scientific finding or an "arty" image. The dizzying awe of Apollo photos isn't really there anymore, since the project leads are so immersed in the history and the imagery that they're kind of jaded. Since prestige isn't an issue anymore with Earth, Moon, and Mars (again, except the surface), they don't bother with prestige images of these familiar worlds. But since Cassini is the only Saturn orbiter ever, prestige images are still a thing.
I shouldn't have to explain why it's a bad thing that they only do prestige shots with new exploration. Once Dawn gives us imagery of Ceres and New Horizons gives us Pluto and some KBOs, what then? There's clearly an institutional exhaustion factor. NASA sees the magic of worlds it's already visited as Old News even though most people have never even seen the decades-old imagery it has in its archives.
But I didn't mean to say that I would be bored after Dawn and New Horizons - I meant that people in NASA are so immersed in it all that they overestimate the public's boredom. They think things are Old News that most people have never even heard of, and that people love to see when they're shown it.
After some prestige shots from initial probes, if they send anything again, it's really detail-oriented scientific probes that take ultra-high-res narrow-angle shots of tiny features and ignore the overall portrait. Once they have a portrait of a planet, they don't really bother to take it again unless it's from a novel perspective.
After they took the Hasselblad photos of the full-globe Earth from the Apollo missions, that was basically it except for lame, computer-colored mosaics stitched together from weather satellites. They try to sell NOAA cartoons like this:
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As worthy successors to this:
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Hence my point - NASA just really doesn't get it when it comes to the core mission of its space probes. They want to believe the mission is scientific because that's rational, but that's not what makes people support them. That Earthrise image is what makes people support them and crave more. They need to deliver that image, in as many variations as possible, over and over, forever, until people can see it with their own eyes. That's what the Chang'e 5 image does - offers a new variation on something NASA had forgotten.
Beware, space-travelers...
If it were behind the Earth in that photo, it would be barely a one pixel dot.
Here is some perspective on the distance:
<img class="wp-image-2250 size-full" src="
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If the moon is twice the distance from the lens as the Earth in that photo, then that means the Earth is a quarter million miles away. That's believable enough considering the apparent size, but that would place the moon at a half million miles distant, and appear to be no more than half the size as seen by us here on the planet.
Considering the diameter of the Earth at 17,000 miles, and the moon at a mere 2,100, it would seem obvious the image of the moon is not 500,000 miles away. It seems more logical that the moon is somewhere between the lens and the Earth.
Remember, the image in my reply is drawn to scale.
<img class="irc_mi" style="margin-top: 79px;" src="
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