Earth

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Earth pictures:

Thanks to country music, poorly written sit coms, and fourth grade science, we know that the earth is the third planet from the sun. Scientists tell us that the earth is over four and a half billion years old. The earth, however, means more to us than the random facts and proportions we can find in a textbook. It is our home, the source of life, from its muck mankind emerged, and into its dark recesses mankind will return. For over four thousand years, mankind has pondered earth and its place among the distant stars. In the 1960s the first few explorers, through clever artifice, defied the unyielding clutches of gravity and saw the earth for what it is, a small chunk of improbability floating in an endless space. Every astronaut who has seen earth from space claims to have been changed in some way. Luckily the space program has produced a number of pictures of earth from space and we can see what they saw.

Voyager One took several pictures of earth from distance in space never before reached by a satellite. The most famous picture of earth taken by Voyager One is the image of earth as a tiny blue speck of light, glimmering in the darkness. This earth picture inspired Carl Sagan to describe our planet as “a pale blue dot”. Astronaut Gene Cernan, one of the first men in space and the last man on the moon, said that from the moon, earth looked like “a distant blue and white star”. Another famous picture of earth, the Blue Marble, taken from Apollo 17 is one of the most widely published images of the blue planet. Photographed on the last mission NASA sent to the moon, this earth picture clearly shows the continent of Africa and the dense cloud cover over the southern pole.

One particularly awe-inspiring picture of earth on this site is Astronaut in Space, showing Bruce McCandless maneuvering in open space at about the distance of a football field. This picture of earth and man reveals how small our planet and our concerns really are in the unbounded sprawl of space. This earth picture is also reminiscent of the first space walk taken by Alexi Leonov, cosmonaut, whose suit expanded to such a degree in his thirty-minute adventure that he risked not being able to reenter his space vehicle. Leonov depressurized his suit in space to fit back into the orbiter, nearly giving himself the bends, so he would not have to be cut loose by his crewmember. As a result of the copious pictures of earth taken by space missions and satellites, we don’t have to risk the same dangers to see the only discovered home of carbon-based life from a distance of thousands of miles.


James Webb©2005