NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory released a new, magnificent picture of our home planet and our moon as seen from a telescope orbiting Mars on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. When the component pictures were taken, Mars was 127 million miles away from the Earth.
Australia is the reddish continent featured near the middle of the Earth in the picture.
The picture is composed of two images to allow for the moon to be more visible and the distance to the two bodies was compressed. From NASA’s explanation:
The image combines two separate exposures taken on Nov. 20, 2016, by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The images were taken to calibrate HiRISE data, since the reflectance of the moon's Earth-facing side is well known. For presentation, the exposures were processed separately to optimize detail visible on both Earth and the moon. The moon is much darker than Earth and would barely be visible if shown at the same brightness scale as Earth.
The combined view retains the correct positions and sizes of the two bodies relative to each other. The distance between Earth and the moon is about 30 times the diameter of Earth. Earth and the moon appear closer than they actually are in this image because the observation was planned for a time at which the moon was almost directly behind Earth, from Mars' point of view, to see the Earth-facing side of the moon.
Nice planet we have here. We need to take better care of it.