Transit of Earth

Elizabeth,
In the course of this transit alone, Earth should have shifted bout 1080 km to the left (24 hrs x 45 km/h, given that the view is at right angle to the orbital motion.) That is almost a third the diameter of the moon, and should certainly be perceptible.

Simply magical.... :)

What is actually visible in the video is a small shift to the left during the actual transit - which is quickly corrected. (Use your mouse pointer as a reference.) This suggests that either (1) the Deep Impact spacecraft is actively maintaining (tracking) Earth alignment - perhaps for communications purposes - or (2) the video has been edited to keep Earth in the center of the frame. But Earth does "wobble" actually several thousand miles each month around the Earth-moon barycenter.

beautiful.

Also remember that the Deep Impact spacecraft is traveling very fast itself along with the earth and moon who are orbiting our Sun. The camera was probably taking a very wide view of space durring its recording so they would have had a fun time making a video of the moon transit.

To answer a couple questions:

1) Yes, the Earth wobbles slightly toward the Moon - it's the center of gravity of the Earth-Moon system than smoothly follows the elliptical path around the sun. That center is not near the center of the earth, but near its surface, so we wobble.

2) Yes, the Moon orbits that fast. The Moon makes one complete synodic (real, not apparent) orbit of the Earth in 29.5 days (708 hours). So to move one degree around the earth would take 708/360 = 1.97 hours. The moon is in view from 5:35 to 10:35 – 5 hours. That means it has moved less than 3 degrees in it’s orbit. That seems reasonable for this view.

Greg,
Actually, the spacecraft, now renamed EPOXI, appears to be just slightly ahead of and crossing Earth's orbit just now, on an orbit of almost identical period, and its motion relative to Earth may be nearly negligible.

I believe the currently-accepted wisdom on the origin of our moon is that it is composed of material ejected when a Mars-sized object collided with the very young Earth, billions of years ago. I recently read something about a study that seemed to confirm that, also. An article by Douglas N. C. Lin in a receint issue of Scientific American magazine ("The Chaotic Genesis of Planets", 5-08) offers a fascinating look into current understanding of the subject. That is science. And for the fundamentalists posting here, one interpretation of Ps 90:4 suggests that one Genesis "creation day" should appear to us to be about 2.2 billion years, so that the universe should seem to be about 13.15 billions years old now (consistent with John 5:17.) That is NOT science at all, but it sure is interesting to this student of the bible.

@Soldier: Love the bugs bunny quote.
Good points. If you are as stated in your handle BTW, keep up the good work, and thanks. Cool video also!

Lets enjoy the art! Soldier, thanks for serving. I did 24 years and all three of my children are now serving. These are the types of videos we like to send each other. When they kids we always made a vaction out of each PCS. We went camping on the way to the next assignment and spent a lot of time watching stars and plantets. First one to see a satelite got five bucks. I sure miss them!

I think every American kid dreams of being an astronaut when they grow up. What a thrill it must be the first time you sit in the shuttle for take-off, realizing you are moments away from reaching beyond the earth. This video here is the good stuff. Makes us all seem so small!

Jordan, et al,
I stand corrected... However, knowing how the movie was made, the images were registered to keep the Earth centered.

Supporter and Che:

Thanks for the nice things you both said. It means a lot to all of us to hear it even anonymously. Supporter, thanks for watching my six and the great things you have said. Che, thank YOU for your service. It's guys like you that make the country work and NASA possible. Great stories, Che and Supporter.

The name of the spacecraft is the Deep Impact flyby spacecraft. It has not been changed to EPOXI. EPOXI is the name of the mission. Confusing (and irritating) I know.

if "currently-accepted wisdom on the origin of our moon is that it is composed of material ejected when a Mars-sized object collided with the very young Earth, billions of years ago" then how this "accepted wisdom" explains the origination of moons around Jupiter(Io, Europa, Ganymade, Collisto), around Saturn and so on. Is it not too many collisions for moon originations ?

ScienceTim here, from the EPOXI team. I can confirm that any wiggles you see in this movie are due to minor defects in the image registration. The Deep Impact spacecraft was not designed for what we are using it for. In particular, that means it does not do a very good job of acquiring and holding an arbitrary pointing, because it was intended to shoot its imaging from short range (a few hundred kilometers instead of several million). The Earth moves all over the place in the raw images, which we have mostly corrected. The Deep Impact camera is not sharply focused and is not focusable due to cost-saving/enhanced reliability measures in the original design -- it may be out of focus, but the focus doesn't change. The original mission did not permit do-overs, so reliability and consistency were paramount. We can digitally correct the poor focus, but it is not a perfectly reliable process. What you see here is the "deconvolved" and registered images.

very cool video....but do they have to keep playing the same dumb advertisement!!

WOW WOW!!!
To be honest, after i saw the vidio my interest to know more about what is going on beyond the earth increases like oil price. and finally all i could say is "WOW!!!"

what if the earth were actualy stationary like the bible suggests?

There are a lot of GREAT space pictures, but this (and the picture of the sun taken from the outer planets) are about the greatest space pictures since 'Earthrise' from the moon. I hope there is another 'greatest' very soon.