You couldn’t see Earth from another star. From even the closest stars, the sun’s glare makes Earth impossible to see. And inside our own solar system? Spacecraft photos tell the tale.
How far away from Earth can we be and see it still with our own eyes?
To find the answer, let’s take an imaginary trip through the solar system, to see how Earth looks from various other places, in our own neighborhood of space. Spacecraft exploring our solar system have given us marvelous views of Earth.
First, imagine blasting off and being about 200 miles (300 km) above Earth’s surface. That’s about the height of the orbit of the International Space Station (ISS). From the window of ISS, the surface of the Earth looms large. In the daytime, you can clearly see major landforms. At night, from Earth orbit, you see the lights of Earth’s cities.
Let’s get farther away, say, the distance of the orbit of the moon.
As we pass the moon – some quarter million miles (about 380,000 km) away – Earth looks like a bright ball in space. It’s not terribly different from the way the moon looks to us.
The first images of the Earth from the moon came from the Apollo mission. Apollo 8 in 1968 was the first human spaceflight to leave Earth orbit. It was the first earthly spacecraft to be captured by and escape from the gravitational field of another celestial body, in this case the moon.
It was the first voyage in which humans visited another world and returned to return to Earth.
In the decades since Voyager first began traveling outward, moon exploration has become more common. The robotic Kaguya spacecraft orbited around Earth’s moon in 2007. Launched by Japan, and officially named the Selenological and Engineering Explorer (SELENE), Kaguya studied the origin and evolution of the moon. The frame below is from Kaguya’s onboard HDTV camera.