Earth from Deep Space

The NASA Deep Impact spacecraft which was sent to rendevouz with the comet Temple 1 a few years ago has just beamed back an incredible film of Earth as seen from deep space.

Deep Impact was 31,000,000 miles (50 million kilometers) away from Earth heading off to look for distant planets in our solar system and yet another comet (Hartly 2) to rendezvous with when it looked back at Earth and took a picture every 15 minutes to create the video sequence.

The object that flies across the Earth is not Darth Vader's Death Star, but the Moon!

I knew that the Moon is small when compared with the Earth and its diameter is about the same as the width of the continental USA, but to see this so graphically illustrated is stunning.By the way, when Deep Impact got to the comet Temple 1 back in 2005 it was 83 million miles from Earth! It fired a block of metal about the size of a washing machine to hit the comet. The resulting explosion was much bigger than anyone expected and generated so much light and dust that the crater the missile made was totally hidden - rather spoiling one of aims of the mission (and the bet the scientists had on how big the crater would be).