This picture has been going around Facebook. The claim is that the bottom object is Earth (I have no reason to doubt that, but I wasn’t there so I can’t be 100% sure). Any idea what the other two are? I’m assuming our Moon above Earth, and Venus above that, but those are both WAGs.
Leave it to The Bad Astronomer to ruin my space-buzz.
The picture was not taken from Mars, but it is apparently taken virtually using a “sky simulator”, so presumably those other dots ARE some time of heavenly body which would be seen from mars.
I don’t know what they could be, but none of them would be our moon. The distance between Earth and the moon would place it MUCH closer to the earth than any of the other dots. After a google search, it looks like you’d need a pair of binoculars to seem them as two twin “stars” in the sky.
Ornery Bob’s link explains that there was a time in 2010 when three planets would have been in that configuration - Earth, Venus and Jupiter.
As for the original image: all this confirms is that relying on information from Facebook is like sleeping with a prostitute without a condom, while using intravenous drugs.
Mars. The only planet in our solar system inhabited solely by robots.
We know that the picture is fake for other reasons, but also, the Earth-Moon distance is amazingly tiny compared to the distance between planets. If the Earth appeared as a point of light, the moon would not be distinguishable against it. (Of course, separate points could be separate planets just fine)
In general, people greatly underestimate the distance between objects in the solar system compared to the sizes of those objects.