Earth and Jupiter in the Same Photo, From Mars | Hacker News Reader

Earth and Jupiter in the Same Photo, From Mars

starryskies.com

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It's a good photo, but I would have prefered a link to the original, more informative, page here

http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2003/05/22/

Google Images is great for checking this sort of thing

http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&source=hp&q=ea...

Sorry, I just linked to the article where I found it.

I liked the photo. Thank you for posting it. I hadn't seen it before.

I find the picture fascinating. Not so much that both planets are in the same shot, but just how big Jupiter appears in the same frame as Earth. Jupiter is roughly 8x the distance from Mars as Earth is from Mars (I think) but Jupiter appears so much larger in the picture. It gives a great perspective on just how big that planet is.

http://www.rense.com/general72/size.htm

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tfs1t-2rrOM

Video that continues passed those shots and goes to the largest star found to date (?) VV Cephei

How can Jupiter and the Earth have light coming at them from different angles?

Never mind, I think I figured it out.

I'm curious - could you please explain?

It only seems weird because we are used to scenes where the sun's rays are roughly parallel. In this picture, the sun represents a point light source, so the objects are lit from different directions.

(Think of balls suspended in space around a lightbulb. The balls on the far side of the bulb from you will appear lit from the front, while the balls on the near side will appear lit from the back, and those between, from the side.)

Mars is in the middle with Earth towards the Sun and Jupiter on the other side of Mars, whatever angle they were at when the picture was taken, their different orbits, probably has something to do with it.

Because they're in different orbits. Earth is closer to the sun than Mars, while Jupiter is about 5 times as distant (likely more in this photograph).

Earth and Jupiter in this photograph are likely in perpendicular positions relative to the sun.

Mars is obviously near-parallel to Earth's terminator line, so to have Jupiter in the same picture it has to run on a nearly straight line through Earth from Mars, given this distance is likely ~7AU or more, Jupiter is on a whole different angle from the sun.

Crudely drawn I believe it should be something(!) like this:

   M
        E

       (S)             J

This picture might help: http://starryskies.com/The_sky/events/mars/earth.jupiter.orb...

(Found on the reddit page linked at the end of the article.)

If I had the money, I'd pay the trillion dollars it would take to fly to Mars (and not die on the way) just to get a view like that, not to mention being on a planet with two visible moons.

How come there are no stars visible? Nice photo anyways... Space is big and perty :)

I think because Jupiter and the Earth are way brighter than the stars are. The dynamic range of the picture doesn't show the stars... According to one of the sites linked in the comments, they already had to brighten the moon some to make it visible.

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