Earth Looks Like 'the Evening Star' in Picture taken by Curiosity: NASA

NASA released an image of Earth and moon taken from the Martian surface by Curiosity rover. Earth appears as an 'Evening star' in the picture.

The image was taken about 80 minutes after sunset during the rover's 529th Martian day- or Jan. 31, 2014 on Earth.

The distance between the planets during the photo-shoot was about 99 million miles, according to a statement released by Jet Propulsion laboratory. Researchers used the left eye of Curiosity's Mast Camera (Mastcam) to get the image of earth and moon. The image was processed to remove the effect of cosmic rays.

"A human observer with normal vision, if standing on Mars, could easily see Earth and the moon as two distinct, bright "evening stars," NASA said in a statement.

Curiosity even tweeted on its first picture of Earth:

Look Back in Wonder... My 1st picture of Earth from the surface of Mars. Info: https://t.co/JMMMmiAEX0 pic.twitter.com/xWOJdMqMVq

— Curiosity Rover (@MarsCuriosity) February 6, 2014

The rover left earth November 26, 2011, on an eight-and-a-half-month long journey to the Red Planet. It landed on the Marian soil, armed with 17 cameras and several scientific instruments. The rover is currently exploring the planet and collecting data, CNN reported. 

The pale blue dot 

Recently, NASA released a natural photo of Saturn and Earth captured by Cassini. The Jupiter-bound probe, Juno also helped researchers develop a movie that showed Earth and moon doing a tango in space. Perhaps the most fascinating image of Earth ever captured was the one from Voyager-1, which clicked the picture of the 'Pale Blue Dot,' from some six billion miles away.