A crescent moon rises above an unearthly sphere

Earth glows with a ghostly blue fire, as a sliver of moon rises above the horizon, in this amazing photo taken from the International Space Station. Seldom has the Earth looked so magical and... unearthly. Check out another pic below.

io9.com

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I wish I had a view like that out my window. Almost looks like we are viewing a distant planet and it's moon.
And I just realized how small the moon is.

Beautiful photos!

Should we freak out about the "orb" below the moon in the first photo....

is that real

It's a lens flair.
At least that's what i think anyway.

reply to post by TortoiseKweek


Hah, Stay calm, don't panic.

It would be something spectacular to see an actual 100% real giant object tailing the moon. I daydream too much.

It coudn't be flaring from the several panes between the camera, thats just silly.

it almost looks like there is a second lens flare just barely above the first lens flare.

strange

Interesting photos.

Originally posted by Oozii
And I just realized how small the moon is.

Even after seeing that photo I still think the moon is relatively huge, it's the largest moon in the solar system in relation to the planet it orbits. Ganymede and Titan are even larger but if you photographed them in a similar perspective to their planet, they would look even smaller because Jupiter and Saturn are so huge:

Largest moons of the planets

Originally posted by saphic
It's a lens flair.
At least that's what i think anyway.

I wouldn't rule out lens flare, but it could also be an out of focus speck of something near the camera.

Lens flare almost always results when a very bright object (like the sun) is in the field of view, or just outside the field of view. I can't really tell for sure just how far outside the field of view the sun is in this photo. The shadow on the moon gives us enough of an idea of the direction of the sun to say it's not behind the camera, which would be enough to rule out lens flare, but since it's somewhere in front of the camera (off to the left a little) I wouldn't rule it out.

Originally posted by pryingopen3rdeye
it almost looks like there is a second lens flare just barely above the first lens flare.

Because modern high quality lenses usually have multiple elements, it's not unusual at all to get multiple reflections from the multiple elements in the lens. The cheap lens in my cell phone cam only seems to have one element but I'm sure NASA is using a better lens than that!