perspective

Clicking photo brings you to the source where more details and a higher resolution can be found.

Pedestrians often comment how astronomy put things into perspectives. This photo of Earth and Moon captures just that. This is an old photograph taken by Mars Odyssey's Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) 19 April 2001. The photo is taken at an opportune time and place where the true distance between our two bodies are shown.



I cut and pasted a number of Earth but was one shy of 30. As the site reminds us, the Earth's diameter is about 12,750 km/7,922 mi, and the distance from the Earth to the Moon is about 385,000 km/239,227 mi, corresponding to 30 Earth diameters.



Source: Planetary Photojournal
Image Credit: NASA/JPL/Arizona State University
JPL Image Use Policy