Blue Marble

MESSENGER (Wikipedia) (seen at right in an artist's impression) is a NASA spacecraft on its way to the planet Mercury for a mission of explanation. Its name is an awkward acronym: MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry and Ranging, but that's a fair description of what it will do. Here is the official MESSENGER website.

In early August, MESSENGER made a swing by the Earth, using our planet as a kind of gravitational slingshot. This swingby maneuver, which is now a common feature of a space probe's trajectory, saves a lot of rocket fuel — but at the cost of taking a lot longer to actually arrive at the destination.

Anyway, MESSENGER happens to be equipped with a good camera, and during this recent swingby maneuver the folks at NASA took pictures at regular intervals — and then strung them all together to make a movie showing what MESSENGER saw as it swung by our humble abode. It's beautiful and spectacular; our blue marble in space. The download is huge (~5MB) but it's worth it...