Pictures of Earth | Universe Today

Written by Fraser Cain

Here are some cool pictures of Earth from space.

Blue Marble Earth

This is the famous "Blue Marble" picture of Earth. It was taken by the crew of Apollo 17 on December 7th, 1972 as they were returning from the Moon. This photo was taken at a distance of 29,000 km. You can see a southern view of Africa in this photo.

Planet Earth seen from Messenger. Image credit: NASA

The next in our tour of pictures of Earth was taken by NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft. Although it's heading to the planet Mercury, MESSENGER made a flyby of Earth to get a gravitational boost. This was a great time to test out the spacecraft's optics.

Earthrise

Here's another famous picture of Earth. This image is known as Earthrise, and it was taken by the crew of Apollo 8 on December 24, 1968. It was captured as Apollo 8 was completing an orbit around the Moon, and they saw the Earth rising above the horizon.

Earth from space

Here's another picture of Earth from space. In this photo you can see the Sun rising over Earth horizon.

And another image of Earth, captured from space by NASA's Space Shuttle.

If you'd like more pictures of Earth, there are some incredible resources available from NASA. I suggest you check out NASA's Earth Observatory, which has a vast archive of Earth images; they also feature one "image of the day". There's a similar resource available from NASA Visible Earth, and NASA Earth from Space.

We have also got some great galleries of the planets. Here are some pictures of Mars, and here are some pictures of the Moon.

We've also recorded an entire episode of Astronomy Cast just about our home planet. Listen here, Episode 51: Earth.

Filed under: Astronomy