For the Love of Geeks

This is the first image ever taken of Earth from the surface of a planet beyond the Moon. It was taken by the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit one hour before sunrise on the 63rd Martian day, or sol, of its mission.

The image is a mosaic of images taken by the rover’s navigation camera showing a broad view of the sky, and an image taken by the rover’s panoramic camera of Earth. The contrast in the panoramic camera image was increased two times to make Earth easier to see.The inset shows a combination of four panoramic camera images zoomed in on Earth. The arrow points to Earth. Earth was too faint to be detected in images taken with the panoramic camera’s color filters.

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Then in 2007 this was taken ..

The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera would make a great backyard telescope for viewing Mars, and we can also use it at Mars to view other planets. This is an image of Earth and the moon, acquired on October 3, 2007, by the HiRISE camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

At the time the image was taken, Earth was 142 million kilometers (88 million miles) from Mars, giving the HiRISE image a scale of 142 kilometers (88 miles) per pixel, an Earth diameter of about 90 pixels and a moon diameter of 24 pixels. The phase angle is 98 degrees, which means that less than half of the disk of the Earth and the disk of the moon have direct illumination. We could image Earth and moon at full disk illumination only when they are on the opposite side of the sun from Mars, but then the range would be much greater and the image would show less detail.

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When the initial rumors that 10.6 would be released at the WWDC, which is tomorrow, they came full of speculation that 10.6 would not support the PowerPC chip set.  This made sense since Jobs has been pulling away from that ever since the deal was made with Intel …

Now, though, Gizmodo (and others) are reporting that they have a source, who claimed to get ahold of the 10.6 seed, who indicated that work has been done on PowerPC drivers which indicates to them that support for the architecture is unlikely to be dropped this time around.

While this rumor may inspire a bit of hope to those who have late-model PowerPC Macs, it should be noted that it runs contrary to running consensus that OS 10.6 “Snow Leopard” would only support Intel chips, and the current direction that Apple has been moving for some time.

Apple is expected to introduce 10.6 at WWDC, along with a shiny new red iPhone….