Our EARTH Is So Beautiful

One of the most striking images ever taken is titled "EARTHRISE" and was taken by the Apollo 8 mission while orbiting the Moon. This is the first image taken by human beings of our home world, floating in deep dark space, a tiny beacon of blue, the (as far as we know) sole bastion of LIFE in Universe. The image is below. Click for a full size version.

This image is widely credited with inflaming the fires of ecological conservation and for influencing the rise of environmentalism in the United States and the world during the late 60's and the 70's. It is an awe-inspiring sight.

On July 4th, 2005, the space-craft Deep Impact directed a probe to impact the nucleus of Comet Tempel 1 , which succeeded admirably. Since then, Deep Impact has been cruising through our solar system and earlier this year looked back to take some remote images of it's home-world, our Earth, 31 million miles away. With the sequences of still images, scientists at NASA managed to create these animations of our Moon crossing the plane of the Earth's rotation. This first one is an infrared/blue-green color composite. That means they imaged it with an infrared camera as well as with blue green visible light, and combined the two for this video.

This next one is wthout the infrared spectrum, and uses just the red/blue/green visible light spectrum for it's images.

As you can see, the infrared spectrum images allow for the viewing of vegetation and other such terrestrial details. It is fucking awesome that we humans can design and build machines that act as our eyes in outer space.