Earth, Our Home

Other Earth Pictures

The Earth, as you know, is our home planet. Being the 3^rd planet from the Sun has some real benefits. One is the fact that the climate of the earth is much more suitable for life than it's nearest neighbors. The temperature on Mercury and Venus are much too hot and Mars is somewhat cold for life (but there still may have been life on the planet in the past). From space our planet is striking beautiful. It's sapphire blue oceans, pure white clouds and various shades of green and brown land, our planet is one of the most colorful.

Earth has a molten interior of metals and silicate materials called magma. This liquefied rock, with its intrinsic magnetism due to the presence of a significant amount of iron, provides shielding for the immense amounts of radiation in space. Also called the Van Allen Radiation Belt, this shielding is what channels the solar wind, with it's charged particles, to the north and south poles creating the Aurora Borealis and Aurora Australians. These particles if not abated by the Van Allen Belts, would wreck havoc on communications and electrical energy transfer.

Another very important and seemingly insignificant feature of Earth is the Ozone layer. Without this colorless barrier, life on earth would be threatened by the amount of ultraviolet radiation given off by the sun.

An A.U. is the distance from the sun to the earth (9.3x10⁷ miles). Oblateness is the fraction by which the equatorial diameter exceeds the polar diameter. Albedo is the fraction of light reflected off of an object.