This is what you look like from Mars
Do you see that multicolored dot shining against a black background? That's us. That's all of us.
An amazing new composite photo taken by a satellite orbiting Mars shows the Earth and our moon shining brightly from 127 million miles away.
Much like the dramatic "pale blue dot" image taken by the Voyager 1 probe in 1990, or any "blue marble" image of Earth, the sense of scale in this new photo is staggering.
Our planet -- which more often than not feels like the most important thing in the universe -- is actually incredibly tiny when seen from this far-off perspective.
"The reddish feature in the middle of the Earth image is Australia. Southeast Asia appears as the reddish area (due to vegetation) near the top; Antarctica is the bright blob at bottom-left. Other bright areas are clouds," NASA said in a statement.
Four sets of photos, some showing the Earth and others showing the moon, were combined to make this photo.
The exposures were taken by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's high resolution camera instrument on Nov. 20 as a calibration test, NASA said.
"Each [exposure] was separately processed prior to combining them so that the moon is bright enough to see," NASA said in a statement.
"The moon is much darker than Earth and would barely be visible at the same brightness scale as Earth. The combined view retains the correct sizes and positions of the two bodies relative to each other."
This isn't the first time the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has taken a photo of our home planet.
In 2007, one year after the spacecraft arrived at Mars, the orbiter snapped a photo of the crescent Earth and moon as they were 88 million miles from the red planet.
That 2007 photo shows South America and clouds obscuring other parts of Earth's surface.
Miriam Kramer worked as a staff writer for Space.com for about 2.5 years before joining Mashable to cover all things outer space. She took a ride in weightlessness on a zero-gravity flight and watched rockets launch to space from places around the United States. Miriam received her Master's degree in science, health and environmental reporting from New York University in 2012, and she originally hails from Knoxville, Tennessee. Follow Miriam on Twitter at @mirikramer.
