9/3 Moment of Zen: Return of the MoZ

School's back, which means I'm keeping up the students' homework blog and its embedded dangling carrot, the Moment of Zen. These will also get posted here when I put them up, which means most M-F in the early afternoon sometime. Without further ado...

A Matter of Perspective...

What planet is this? Although seemingly something out of The Little Prince, the planet is actually Earth. More specifically, it is a small part of the Earth incorporated into a four image stereographic "Little Planet " projection. The central fisheye image points down, while the surrounding wide-angle images were taken at a 30 degree tilt and added digitally later. Earth-anchored items surrounding the image center include green grass, dark shadows, and trees near and far. At the image top ("noon" if the planet were a clock) is the well-lit Parkes Radio Telescope dish in New South Wales, Australia. The surrounding sky contains many jewels of the night including the Moon at 9 pm, the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy at 1:30 pm and 7 pm, and the Small Magellanic Cloud galaxy at 5 pm. A full field interactive version of this scene can be found here.

Photo and explanation lifted from NASA's Astronomy Photo of the Day archive, which features and explains an interesting image every day.