Transit of Earth

Almost forgot! THANKS to you too Ned!

yolande,
I think I read somewhere that the sun will become a red giant long before the moon leaves Earth orbit.

And people say there is “no” God

WOW, THIS JUST PROVES THAT GOD MAKES THE BEST PICTURES!!!!!

There is NO God, probably.

Note from Ned Potter–
Larry, we asked about the video quality. The answer from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center is that the time-lapse was put together from a very small part of each image sent by the spacecraft, so they can’t improve it. (Think of enlarging one face from a group photo you take with a digital camera.)
“That’s what you get from 31 million miles away,” said one of the people we reached.
And, Chris, just to clarify: the images are indeed from May 29, just released. They said it took a little time to realize they had something good, and then match up the images to turn them into a time-lapse.

Fool Most of the people some of the time. Fool me non of the time. NASA The Truth is comming out and there is nothing you can do about it.

And then Corrice checks in from the grassy knoll.

I had never before considered how much higher is Earth’ albedo compared to that of the moon. Next to “Earthlight”, moonlight looks really dingy and dim! BTW, one reason that Earth might appear to shift to the left in this time-lapse is simply that Earth DOES shift a bit. The moon does not revolve around Earth’s center, but rather Earth and its moon revolve together in a dance around their common center of mass (“center of gravity” or “barycenter”) in such a manner that that common center of mass DOES NOT shift in its orbit of the sun. When the moon goes one way, Earth must simultaneously shift the other way by perhaps several hundred miles, so that the common center of mass may remain in its place or path.

GWP, in addition to what Elizabeth said, remember that the Earth-Moon distance is several dozen Earth radii. So the Moon is travelling in a much larger circle than is immediately apparent in the video.

Simply magical…. :)

beautiful.

To answer a couple questions:
1) Yes, the Earth wobbles slightly toward the Moon – it’s the center of gravity of the Earth-Moon system than smoothly follows the elliptical path around the sun. That center is not near the center of the earth, but near its surface, so we wobble.
2) Yes, the Moon orbits that fast. The Moon makes one complete synodic (real, not apparent) orbit of the Earth in 29.5 days (708 hours). So to move one degree around the earth would take 708/360 = 1.97 hours. The moon is in view from 5:35 to 10:35 – 5 hours. That means it has moved less than 3 degrees in it’s orbit. That seems reasonable for this view.

I believe the currently-accepted wisdom on the origin of our moon is that it is composed of material ejected when a Mars-sized object collided with the very young Earth, billions of years ago. I recently read something about a study that seemed to confirm that, also. An article by Douglas N. C. Lin in a receint issue of Scientific American magazine (“The Chaotic Genesis of Planets”, 5-08) offers a fascinating look into current understanding of the subject. That is science. And for the fundamentalists posting here, one interpretation of Ps 90:4 suggests that one Genesis “creation day” should appear to us to be about 2.2 billion years, so that the universe should seem to be about 13.15 billions years old now (consistent with John 5:17.) That is NOT science at all, but it sure is interesting to this student of the bible.

Lets enjoy the art! Soldier, thanks for serving. I did 24 years and all three of my children are now serving. These are the types of videos we like to send each other. When they kids we always made a vaction out of each PCS. We went camping on the way to the next assignment and spent a lot of time watching stars and plantets. First one to see a satelite got five bucks. I sure miss them!

Jordan, et al,
I stand corrected… However, knowing how the movie was made, the images were registered to keep the Earth centered.

The name of the spacecraft is the Deep Impact flyby spacecraft. It has not been changed to EPOXI. EPOXI is the name of the mission. Confusing (and irritating) I know.

ScienceTim here, from the EPOXI team. I can confirm that any wiggles you see in this movie are due to minor defects in the image registration. The Deep Impact spacecraft was not designed for what we are using it for. In particular, that means it does not do a very good job of acquiring and holding an arbitrary pointing, because it was intended to shoot its imaging from short range (a few hundred kilometers instead of several million). The Earth moves all over the place in the raw images, which we have mostly corrected. The Deep Impact camera is not sharply focused and is not focusable due to cost-saving/enhanced reliability measures in the original design — it may be out of focus, but the focus doesn’t change. The original mission did not permit do-overs, so reliability and consistency were paramount. We can digitally correct the poor focus, but it is not a perfectly reliable process. What you see here is the “deconvolved” and registered images.

WOW WOW!!!
To be honest, after i saw the vidio my interest to know more about what is going on beyond the earth increases like oil price. and finally all i could say is “WOW!!!”

There are a lot of GREAT space pictures, but this (and the picture of the sun taken from the outer planets) are about the greatest space pictures since ‘Earthrise’ from the moon. I hope there is another ‘greatest’ very soon.

Ilya,
The many moons of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune very well could have been captured. They very well could have also coalesced(spelling?) during the initial planet formation, or directly following. The size of the Jovian planets probably means they were captured early on. I doubt that they would have coalesced, since the Jovian worlds would have had an easy time absorbing any material in their general area during their formation, their sizes can make this seen. So just like Mars’ Phobos and Diemos, which are believed to be captured asteroids, I think it’s safe to say the Jovian moons were, for the most part, probably captured. Now, this is just my thinking, and no research went into it. You can go do a search on Google and find out.
That is a very cool video. I’ve always been fascinated by Astronomy. I used to go out every clear night I had with my telescopes. I’ve got my large one packed away now. Living in an apartment and having three young kids doesn’t give me much time to indulge in it anymore.