"That's no moon..."

Well, yes it is. In fact it's our moon, the one and only "The Moon" and the world that hugs it close to its gravitational embrace.

I am absolutely mesmerized by this short movie, barely a minute long.

Check it out here at Space.com.

That's your home as seen from 31 million miles away, perhaps the clearest image of our planet viewed from deep space. It covers a full rotation, and as you watch, the dark side of the Moon glides by with a deceptive sense of closeness to its parent world.

The space probe Deep Impact, outward bound to crash projectiles into comets just to peek inside, turned around to view its own launchpad and caught this amazing video. There is no other of its kind.

As I watch this moving image of what we think of as an expansive, limitless world turning quietly in the night, a small thing with a smaller companion whirling away with no visible locomotion other than whatever cosmic hand set it in motion eons ago, it jogs my memory back to some very profound words spoken by a man who walked on that tiny worldlet that darts unceremoniously across the disk of our home skies:

"It was hard to believe that everybody I had ever known, or seen on TV, and the places they lived and played, were all on that little blue-and-white marble."
-- Alan Bean, Apollo Astronaut

It is hard to believe, isn't it? All of history, all of mankind, everyone who lives, will live, or ever lived and died, every form of creature, angel or devil, everything ever imagined or aspired to or feared, all right there.

It's that sort of merging of imagination with nearly unfathomable fact that we Star Wars fans should remember - we may dream of galaxies far, far away, but our own little planet is amazing in its own right. Maybe not for how grand it is, but in a way, how small it is, how out of the way it is, and maybe how beautiful it is when it lights up that endless starry night.

Enjoy :0)

DM out