Abstract
The place of our planet in the Cosmos was one of the main topics of debate among the first philosophical schools. At that time, humans were also beginning to map the surface of the planet, a process which advanced slowly and involved considerable effort. Only recently have we been able to contemplate our planet from outer space, the same perspective that we have when the first exoearths are discovered and mapped. And so it is that we start a stepwise journey in this chapter to see our planet and its environment from increasing distances until our Galaxy is reduced to a single point.
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Notes
- 1.
No word written by Leucippus has survived. From Democritus we have only some fragments of his books, but a good description of his principles are included in the writings of Aristotle and Diogenes Laertius.
- 2.
For the Chinese, the basic elements were five: earth, wood, metal, water and fire.
- 3.
It was published in 1543, though he had arrived at his theory some time earlier.
- 4.
Unfortunately, his work On the measurement of the Earth was lost. We know about his method from indirect sources and the value obtained for the Earth diameter is estimated between 39,690 and 46,620 km.
- 5.
The map was kept in the castle of Prince Johannes Waldburg in Germany until it was acquired, in 2001, by the Library of the US Congress. It is now on display in its Thomas Jefferson Building.
- 6.
Curiously, the Pacific Sea was discovered only in 1513 by Vasco Nuñez de Balboa.
- 7.
For this photograph to be made, the camera, light-sensitive material and a development system had to be taken on the balloon in order to develop the picture instantly after it was exposed.
- 8.
A caricature of the event remains, prepared by Honorè Daumier (1808–1879) for the 25 May 1862 issue of Le Boulevard.
- 9.
The photograph is preserved at the Boston Public Library.
- 10.
Balloons were explored as observation platforms during the American Civil War, with Wallace urging aerial photography as a technique for reconnaissance.
- 11.
Published in National Geographic, May 1936.
- 12.
This project was started 20 years ago by Nancy Evans and completed recently by Dennis Wingo and Keith Cowing.
- 13.
A crash landing on Earth flattened and broke open the film canister, but 52 photographs were recovered with some degree of laceration and fogging.
- 14.
He also commented: The Earth from here is a grand ovation to the big vastness of space.
- 15.
Article on The New York Times, 25 December 1968.
- 16.
He was a member of the Apollo 11 crew and the second man on the Moon. His feelings while observing the Earth from the outer space have been taken from a interview appearing recently (23 April 2008) in the Spanish newspaper El País.
- 17.
Thousands of images of our planet, taken by astronauts, are archived at the NASA-Johnson Space Center (http://eol.jsc.nasa.gov), including around 800 images of the Whole Earth.
- 18.
He flew on the mission STS-51-G in the shuttle Discovery from 17–24 June 1985, together with a French astronaut and five US astronauts.
- 19.
He was commander of three missions: Soyuz 25, Soyuz 29 and Soyuz T-4.
- 20.
Fly-bys make use of the gravitational attraction of planets to modify a spacecraft’s trajectory and to gain the orbital energy needed to reach the final target.
- 21.
The Galileo (1992), Rosetta (2005) and Venus Express (2005) spacecrafts also took images of the Earth–Moon system from the vicinity of the Earth.
- 22.
After a decision made by the International Astronomical Union on 24 August 2006. See Chap. 7 for more details.
- 23.
Mercury was too close to the Sun to be seen. Mars was not detectable by the cameras due to scattered sunlight in the optics.
- 24.
Conventional explanations for this event are based on the emergence of the Panama isthmus or climate cooling. See Chap. 2.
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Vázquez, M., Pallé, E., Rodríguez, P.M. (2010). Observing the Earth. In: The Earth as a Distant Planet. Astronomy and Astrophysics Library. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-1684-6_1
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