the adventures of teapot the cat

As the Earth Turns

Posted on November 13th, 2007

While chillin with some friends in expensive suits on the moon, drinking cosmos - if you watched the brilliant marble called Earth rise over the distant, dull and dusty horizon and gazed on it for a couple hours, you couldn’t help but marvel at the fact that it was gracefully spinning endlessly in the blackness of space.

“The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency and NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation) have successfully performed the world’s first high-definition image taking of an Earth-rise by the lunar explorer KAGUYA which was injected into a lunar orbit at an altitude of about 100 km on October 18, 2007″

Feeling somewhat thoughtful after seeing the super-cool (unfortunately not HD) video of the earth rising, I wrote the little bit above. The interesting thing is that when I fully read the JAXA page, it said:

“* Note: we use the expression “Earth-rise” in this press release, but the Earth-rise is a phenomenon seen only from satellites that travel around the Moon, such as the KAGUYA and the Apollo space ship. The Earth-rise cannot be observed by a person who is on the Moon as they can always see the Earth at the same position.”

So in reality, the Earth would just hang in mid-no-air, spinning away in pretty much the same place in the not-sky all not-day.

Entry Filed under: Japan, SciTech