Earth as seen from Mars on 19 October 2014, with Added Comet Siding Spring

Strangely, one of the top searches that brings people to my blog is “Earth from Mars”, so I started to provide views of Earth from Mars simulated in Stellarium (see here and here for some previous examples I have provided) .

But seeing as the story of comet C/2013 A1 (Siding Spring) potentially impacting Mars has gone viral around the world (astroblog is currently number 2 when you Google “C/2013 A1″ see my previous posts here and here, with Celestia script, my post also got mentioned in New Scientist too, WOOT, along with Universe Today) I thought I would give the Earth from Mars fans something special. Earth from Mars with comet C/2013 A1 in view.

On the 19th (Mars at Adelaide equivalent time, around 18th UT) Earth is low above the eastern Martian horizon pre-Dawn, and the comet is bright and near the Zenith. By the 20th (19th UT) comet Siding SPring has zipped over to the Southern skies, and is glowing at roughly magnitude -4, as bright as Venus is in Earths skies. This should be easy to image from the Mars orbiters and surface rovers.

There is no tail on the comet because predicting tail appearance is difficult, at Mars’s distance the comet may have a rather short tail.