Back in May of this year, the Mars Global Surveyer was commanded to turn its’ camera outwards at the solar system. These marvelous images show us the home system as not-so-far-future Martian colonists will see it.
I was particularly captivated by this view of North and South America as it would appear to an amateur astronomer.
Hey! You can see my house from up here!
This gets to me everytime I see it.
Moon Landscape by Petr Ginz His talent and imagination were boundless and that his picture got to go into space with Illan Ramon was a wonderful tribute.
As Gary Larson wrote: ”If you squint your eyes just right you can see the Zork in the Earth!”.
SPOILER
The cartoon showed America-shaped indigenous Moon dwellers gazing up at the Earth. As the astronomically literate will have spotted, it is a two level joke at the expense of both Human anthropocenticity and American parochialism (the Earth does not present only a single face to the Moon in the way that the Moon does to the Earth).
What a waste of american taxpayers money.
Huh. *I* don’t think it’s a waste, because I am one of those foolish dreamers who hopes to see, at the very least, working laboratories on other stellar bodies in my lifetime… not in the least because I think the best solution to “overpopulation” is to go upward and outward.