Interesting Photo of the Day: Earth Looks Like an Evening Star to Martians

Interesting Photos

If intelligent life does exist on Mars, perhaps Martians wish on Earth when they wish upon the stars:

“NASA Mars Rover Curiosity Sees ‘Evening Star’ Earth.” (Via NASA. Click to see full size.)

This image was captured roughly an hour and a half after sunset by NASA’s Curiosity Rover as it explored Mars on January 31, 2014. Curiosity is equipped with two navigation cameras that function together like a pair of eyes and play a crucial role in NASA’s ongoing study about Mars’ environment and the possibility of habitable past conditions.

From the Red Planet, Earth looks like just another star—and that’s because the distance between Earth and Mars at the time of the photo was about 99 million miles (160 million kilometers).

“A human observer with normal vision, if standing on Mars, could easily see Earth and the moon [below it] as two distinct, bright ‘evening stars,'” writes NASA.