Pale Blue Dot...

If I had been an engineer in the 50's, 60's or 70's, I totally would have worked for NASA.

This is a picture of Earth as taken from the surface of Mars, as taken by the Mars Rover Spirit. It is the first time that a picture of the homeworld has been taken from the surface of another world since Gene Cernan and Jack Schmidt did so on Apollo 17. (This photo is from the Mars Rovers site.)

Another cool site is Blue Marble, a NASA site that is dedicated to providing high resolution photos of the Earth's surface. They continuously photograph the whole world over the course of many months, and then stitch together all the photos, making sure that each sector they use is cloud-free. The result is some stunning whole-earth photos with no clouds to spoil the view.

For some fantastic restored photos from the entire Apollo program, check out The Apollo Image Gallery.

Try the Astronomy Picture of the Day for a daily picture from NASA's collection, including many stunning images from Hubble.

I like using various ones for desktop pictures. Enjoy!