New photos taken by the Mars Curiosity Rover are giving us another look at our home in the cosmos. On Earth, we call Venus the"evening star," because it rises like a bright star in the western sky. But this new "evening star" is Earth itself as we would see it standing on the surface of Mars. And what's that tiny dot below the Earth? It's our faithful moon circling our world.
Here are the technical details of the images, per NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology: "Researchers used the left eye camera of Curiosity's Mast Camera (Mastcam) to capture this scene about 80 minutes after sunset on the 529th Martian day, or sol, of the rover's work on Mars (Jan. 31, 2014). The image has been processed to remove effects of cosmic rays."
One other thing to know: When Curiosity snapped these pictures, the Earth and Mars were 99 million miles apart.