As Phil Plait explains in Slate, this new image isn't quite a new Earthrise, from a technical point of view, because this isn't really a photograph but a composite image produced by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter on October 12, 2015. But that hasn't stopped it being seen as an updated version thereof, e.g. when Cnet headlines: "Sublime new NASA Earthrise image shows rare view from the moon." The composite nature of the image somehow makes Earth feel a bit more distant, a bit more interfered with, compared to the original photo, but of course a camera, too, is technology. There would be a more rigorous argument to be laid out here, but now is not the time. Perhaps the update is fitting: the more "we" play with DNA and pollute ourselves, the more we should perhaps see "our" world through increasing layers of our own intervention. It's harder and harder to "step outside." Apollo's Eye just moved further away! The Guardian announces how the "US space agency has released a picture" of the dark side of the moon, "taken from its Deep Space Climate Observatory showing the moon as it moves in front of the sunlit side of Earth." The image was taken about a million miles from Earth.
President Obama announces major action on climate change.
Various news outlets have been announcing the discovery of a new candidate for Earth 2.0, i.e. Kepler 452b. The Huffington Post announces: “NASA's Kepler mission team revealed during a teleconference […] that an alien planet similar to Earth, named Kepler-452b, has been discovered in the "habitable zone" of a sun-like star.” Other information here. I particularly like Jeff Schweitzer’s title for his blog post: “Earth 2.0: Bad News for God!” Various websites are thus posting artist impressions of the new planet, from close-up and from afar, for example the New York Times. Strangely contemporaneous with this is the fact that NASA also just released a new image of Earth 1.0, apparently the first image for decades (since the Blue Marble) that isn’t the result of stitching various photos together: “A NASA camera on the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) satellite has returned its first view of the entire sunlit side of Earth from one million miles away.”
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Project THE HUMANIST anthropoceneis a thought archive and workspace of Phillip John Usher (NYU) at the crossroads of early modern humanism and the problems and insights of the Anthropocene. Main Research Page. Categories
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Related SitesASLE (Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment)
Environmental Humanities (journal) Resilience (A Journal of the Environmental Humanities) All text and images quoted from other sources used according to fair use. If I have used one of your images and you would like me to remove it, please email me.
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