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| There is little star behind Saturn's dusty ring, that's Earth! |
Every time we look at
Earth from space it look very calm and beautiful. Most of time wrapped in
clouds, its major area covered by water and rest of its area can be seen with
different colors of landscapes. Astronauts call her Blue Marble. They often
says, it’s beautiful to see peaceful earth from space. No one can imagine that
there are many things happening down there. Turbulent tornadoes, gusting wind,
running rivers, stormy rain, sliding lands all seems very quiet from space. Borders
are not visible from over there. Even Earth never look religious from space. It
just appear as calm Blue Marble.
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| A Blue Marble, Earth seen by Apollo 17 |
Earth appear as a marble in the vicinity of Earth’s Space.
How she look from the distant space? Our spacecraft studying alien worlds in
our solar system has looked time to time towards the planet from where they get
signals. It’s very amazing to see our world from there. Here is the image of
Earth from moon’s horizon taken during Apollo 8 mission. It was the first
earth rise seen by humans from moon. Like moon, she also displays phases from
moon.
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| Earth rise over Moon horizon |
Messenger spacecraft studying planet mercury seen our earth
on 6 May 2010. From that distance earth and moon can be observe separately. If this pair observe for long time one can see moon revolve around Earth.
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| Pair of Earth and Moon seen from Mercury by Messenger |
This image of Earth in
Martian sky taken by Mars rover Curiosity on 31 January 2014. It appear like a star for rover camera and later it zoomed in during image processing. For any observer
with normal human eye could see earth and moon separately in Martian sky.
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| Earth and Moon in Martian sky |
We in the vast Universe
It was very old quest for humanity to find out our existence
in this infinite universe. Human’s affinity towards this quest shown us the
real picture of our planet in this universe. Previously it was thought that our
world was built by Supreme Being called god and he place our world in the
center of the universe. Because, we humans considered ourselves very special to him. He and only he can see our world. But, then humans
started observing and studying universe and celestial bodies’ motion very
keenly. It helped us in understanding out our planet’s position in solar
system. We found our world is moving around the sun. Then, further
observation led us towards the conclusion that our sun is also very ordinary
star and located in outer region of galaxy. One of our spacecraft, Voyager 1 after starting its
journey towards outside the solar system, it looks back towards earth and capture
her image. This image first time shown us reality of our planet. Earth from that distance appeared as mere a tiny speck of dust. It
showed us that in this infinite space we all are alone on this tiny dust
particle. Only particle in known universe carrying life on it. We humans are not special in this universe but this life carrying dust particle in universe is very special. Now it’s time
to value our home planet.
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| In 1990 Voyager 1 captured Earth, famous astronomer Carl Sagan called it a Pale Blue Dot |
All images in this article are from NASA's image gallery
