Earth from deep space

[Viking]

Nope, not a reposting of the classic Voyager 1 picture, but rather a new movie from the Deep Impact spacecraft that is currrently in its extended mission phase.

The video was recorded to get an idea as of what an Earth like extrasolar planet might look like through a telescope. A corresponding press release can be found here.

The Earth has a rather large apparent size in the video, so note that:

"To image Earth in a similar fashion, an alien civilization would need technology far beyond what Earthlings can even dream of building," said Sara Seager, a planetary theorist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Mass., and a co-investigator on EPOXI. "Nevertheless, planet-characterizing space telescopes under study by NASA would be able to observe an Earth twin as a single point of light -- a point whose total brightness changes with time as different land masses and oceans rotate in and out of view. The video will help us connect a varying point of planetary light with underlying oceans, continents, and clouds -- and finding oceans on extrasolar planets means identifying potentially habitable worlds." said Seager.