An EPIC View of the Moon in Earth's Orbital Embrace

As a suitably impressive follow-up to the new “blue marble” image of our world released in July, today NASA shared a gorgeous animation created from pictures captured by NOAA’s Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) spacecraft positioned nearly a million miles (1.5 million km) away -- over four times farther than the moon.

In a series of images acquired between 3:50 and 8:45 p.m. EDT on July 16, 2015, the moon can be seen passing in front of a rotating Earth, the warm gray face of its far side framed by the swirling-cloud-covered blue water of the eastern Pacific Ocean. The north pole is at the 11 o’clock position, illustrating our planet’s 23.5-degree axial tilt.

“It is surprising how much brighter Earth is than the moon,” said Adam Szabo, DSCOVR project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “Our planet is a truly brilliant object in dark space compared to the lunar surface.”

The individual images were taken by the high-definition EPIC instrument (yes, that’s a real NASA acronym) using visible-light channels; it’s how Earth and the moon would appear to our eyes were we there with DSCOVR at L1 (perhaps with a little help from a telephoto lens). DSCOVR is a partnership between NASA, NOAA and the U.S. Air Force.

L1 is a point in space about 1/100th the distance to the sun where the gravitational pulls from it and the Earth cancel each other out, allowing spacecraft to be “parked” there. Launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on Feb. 11, 2015, NOAA’s DSCOVR spacecraft arrived at L1 on June 8.

Read more at Discovery News