A Distant View of Home

When I saw the image above, the hair on the back of my neck stood up. Recognize them? Those are the Earth and Moon, as seen from Mars. That image was taken by the phenomenal HiRISE camera on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which was just over 200 million km from Earth at the time. It's actually a composite of a few separate images, processed to show the relative size and position of our planet and its moon. HiRISE normally points down to take amazing images of the surface of Mars; it can ...