Earthrise at Christmas Thirty-five years ago this Christmas, a

Earthrise at Christmas
Thirty-five years ago this Christmas, a turbulent world looked to the heavens for a
unique view of our home planet. This photo of "Earthrise" over the lunar horizon was
taken by the Apollo 8 crew in December 1968, showing Earth for the first time as it
appears from deep space. Astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and William Anders
had become the first humans to leave Earth orbit, entering lunar orbit on Christmas
Eve. In a historic live broadcast that night, the crew took turns reading from the Book
of Genesis, closing with a holiday wish from Commander Borman: "We close with
good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you -- all of you on the
good Earth."
1
Sunset of Mars – Spirit Rover, Sol 489 (April 2005)
This Panoramic Camera (Pancam) mosaic was taken around 6:07 in the evening of the
rover's 489th Martian day, or sol. The floor of Gusev crater is visible in the distance,
and the sun is setting behind the wall of Gusev some 80 km (50 miles) in the distance.
This small panorama of the western sky was obtained using Pancam's 750-nm, 530nm and 430-nm color filters. This filter combination allows false color images to be
generated that are similar to what a human would see, but with the colors slightly
exaggerated. In this image, the bluish glow in the sky above the sun would be visible
to us if we were there, but an artifact of the Pancam's infrared imaging capabilities is
that with this filter combination the redness of the sky farther from the sunset is
exaggerated compared to the daytime colors of the Martian sky.
2
Opportunity Catches its Shadow on Sol 180
3
Curiosity’s Self Portrait – Sol 32 (September 7, 2012)
You’ll notice it’s a bit dusty! That’s because it was acquired through the transparent
dust cover protecting the high resolution Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) camera
positioned on the turret at the end of its 7 foot (2.1 meter) long robotic arm. This
image was taken on Sol 32 (Sept. 7, 2012) with the dust cover closed over the camera
lens and thus provides a taste of even more spectacular views yet to come.
4
Curiosity landing Site Panorama – Aug. 2012
This color panorama shows a 360-degree view of the landing site of NASA's Curiosity
rover, including the highest part of Mount Sharp visible to the rover. That part of
Mount Sharp is approximately 12 miles (20 kilometers) away from the rover. The
images were obtained by the rover's 34-millimeter Mast Camera. The mosaic, which
stretches about 29,000 pixels across by 7,000 pixels high, includes 130 images taken
on Aug. 8 and an additional 10 images taken on Aug. 18. These images were shot
before the camera was fully characterized.
5
Saturn with Earth - Sept. 15, 2006
With giant Saturn hanging in the blackness and sheltering Cassini from the sun's
blinding glare, the spacecraft viewed the rings as never before, revealing previously
unknown faint rings and even glimpsing its home world. This marvelous panoramic
view was created by combining a total of 165 images taken by the Cassini wide-angle
camera. Color in the view was created by digitally compositing ultraviolet, infrared
and clear filter images and was then adjusted to resemble natural color. Earth in
background on left.
6
Rings of Saturn - August 2009
Vertical structures, among the tallest seen in Saturn's main rings, rise abruptly from
the edge of Saturn's B ring to cast long shadows on the ring in this image taken by
NASA's Cassini spacecraft. Part of the Cassini Division, between the B and the A rings,
appears at the top of the image, showing ringlets in the inner division. Saturn’s ring
system is 63,000 km wide
7
Extreme Ultraviolet Sun - May 1998
This composite SOHO image combines Extreme Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope (EIT)
images from three wavelengths (171, 195 and 284 angstrom) into one that reveals
solar features unique to each wavelength. Since the EIT images come to us from the
spacecraft in black and white, they are color coded for easy identification. For this
image, the nearly simultaneous images from May 1998 were each given a color code
(red, yellow and blue) and merged into one.
8
Pillars of Creation – April 1, 1995
This is an iconic visible-light image from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope of the Eagle
Nebula, which also features a star-forming region, or nebula, that is being sculpted
into pillars by radiation and winds from hot, massive stars.
9
Pillars of Creation – April 1, 1995
The color image is constructed from three separate images taken in the light of
emission from different types of atoms. Red shows emission from singly-ionized
sulfur atoms. Green shows emission from hydrogen. Blue shows light emitted by
doubly- ionized oxygen atoms. The Eagle Nebula is part of a much larger region
dubbed the "Mountains of Creation" which were mapped by the Spitzer Space
Telescope. The pillars are part of a region called W5 by astronomers, in the Cassiopeia
constellation 7,000 light-years away and 50 light-years across.
10
Central region of Milky Way - 2009
In celebration of the International Year of Astronomy 2009, NASA's Great
Observatories — the Hubble Space Telescope, the Spitzer Space Telescope, and the
Chandra X-ray Observatory — have collaborated to produce an unprecedented image
of the central region of our Milky Way galaxy.
In this spectacular image, observations using infrared light and X-ray light see
through the obscuring dust and reveal the intense activity near the galactic core.
Note that the center of the galaxy is located within the bright white region to the
right of and just below the middle of the image. The entire image width covers about
one-half a degree, about the same angular width as the full moon.
Each telescope's contribution is presented in a different color:
- Yellow represents the near-infrared observations of Hubble. These observations
outline the energetic regions where stars are being born as well as reveal hundreds of
thousands of stars.
- Red represents the infrared observations of Spitzer. The radiation and winds from
stars create glowing dust clouds that exhibit complex structures from compact,
spherical globules to long, stringy filaments.
- Blue and violet represent the X-ray observations of Chandra. X-rays are emitted by
gas heated to millions of degrees by stellar explosions and by outflows from the
supermassive black hole in the galaxy's center. The bright blue blob on the left side is
emission from a double star system containing either a neutron star or a black hole.
11
Hubble eXtreme Deep Field – October 2012
The photo was assembled by combining 10 years of NASA Hubble Space Telescope
photographs taken of a patch of sky at the center of the original Hubble Ultra Deep
Field. The Hubble Ultra Deep Field is an image of a small area of space in the
constellation Fornax, created using Hubble Space Telescope data from 2003 and
2004. By collecting faint light over many hours of observation, it revealed thousands
of galaxies, both nearby and very distant, making it the deepest image of the universe
ever taken at that time. The new full-color XDF image is even more sensitive, and
contains about 5,500 galaxies even within its smaller field of view. The faintest
galaxies are one ten-billionth the brightness of what the human eye can see. The
universe is 13.7 billion years old, and the XDF reveals galaxies that span back 13.2
billion years in time. Most of the galaxies in the XDF are seen when they were young,
small, and growing, often violently as they collided and merged together. The
youngest galaxy found in the XDF existed just 450 million years after the universe's
birth in the big bang.
12
“Pale Blue Dot” - 1990
This narrow-angle color image of the Earth, dubbed 'Pale Blue Dot', is a part of the
first ever 'portrait' of the solar system taken by Voyager 1. The spacecraft acquired a
total of 60 frames for a mosaic of the solar system from a distance of more than 4
billion miles from Earth and about 32 degrees above the ecliptic. From Voyager's
great distance Earth is a mere point of light, less than the size of a picture element
even in the narrow-angle camera. Earth was a crescent only 0.12 pixel in size.
Coincidentally, Earth lies right in the center of one of the scattered light rays resulting
from taking the image so close to the sun. This blown-up image of the Earth was
taken through three color filters -- violet, blue and green -- and recombined to
produce the color image. The background features in the image are artifacts resulting
from the magnification.
“Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love,
everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was,
lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident
religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero
and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every
young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer,
every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme
leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of
dust suspended in a sunbeam.”
13