Watch: The Earth Rise from the JAXA Kaguya spacecraft
This week, the Japanese Space Agency released the first HD footage of the Earth Rise from the Moon. This footage, man. This footage is fucking stunning. Glory! Perspective! Now, just imagine HD footage from Mars. Okay, yeah, fine. This is only tangentially related. But it still gets my geek-gonads gooey.
These aren’t renderings, special effects, or a scene from No Man’s Sky. This is actual footage of the Earth and the Moon, as seen by Japan’s Kaguya spacecraft in October 2008. Shot with a pair of 2.2 megapixel HDTV sensors, it’s some of the first HD footage of our nearest neighbor that humans ever captured.
From 2007 to 2009, three Japanese scientific probes composing the Selenological and Engineering Explorer (SELENE) mission orbited the Moon, collecting troves of data along with some spectacular photos. This week, the Japanese Space Agency, JAXA, publicly released all of the images captured by the mission’s primary photographer, Kaguya.