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November 21, 2007
Earth at Night from Rosetta
My friend Paul Gilster at Centauri Dreams posted about an interesting photo from the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft whose mission is to approach a comet. Rosetta has a complex trajectory including three Earth and one Mars gravity assist approaches before finally reaching the comet. As it was coming by the Earth recently, it captured a beautiful composite picture of the Earth (from 80 thousand km) showing a thin crescent of daylight and capturing city lights on the dark portion.
Naturally, being a Google Earth fanatic, I immediately thought of comparing the view to GE with the NASA Earth City Lights layer. So, I created a placemark so you can compare the Rosetta photo to Google Earth. Just turn on the layer in GE found now under: "Gallery->NASA->Earth City Lights". Then open this placemark 
to view the same view as Rosetta in Google Earth. The advantage to viewing the Earth City Lights layer is that you can see the entire Earth, zoom in a bit closer for more detail, and turn on other layers like Roads and Populated Places so you can see which roads and cities the lights belong to. Or click on the thumbnail to see a closer comparison.
Posted by FrankTaylor at November 21, 2007 08:25 AM
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Posted by: Gary Alexander at November 21, 2007 09:02 AM
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Um...wow. Thank you. That night shot is just nice.