OVERVIEW
] PLANETEarth is a terrestrial planet. It orbits the Sun at a mean distance of 1 . It has a mass of 1.00 and a mean radius of 1.00 · 6371 . It has been known since antiquity.
The only place in this catalogue known to host life, and the only one anybody has ever observed from the inside.
- WHAT IT IS
- Terrestrial planet
- HOW FAR
- 1
- HOW BIG
- 1.00 · 6371
- ONE ORBIT TAKES
- 365
Its average distance from the Sun, not from Earth.
Its mean radius: half the width across.
One trip round the Sun.
THE MODEL
] CATALOGUED RADIUSCALCULATED · NOT AN OBSERVATION · CATALOGUED RADIUS · DENSITY 5.51 G/CM³ FROM MASS AND RADIUS · GEOMETRIC ALBEDO 0.367 · RADIUS 6370 KM · LIT FROM WHERE THE SUN IS · TURNING ABOUT ITS OWN POLE · SURFACE FROM A GLOBAL MAP · AT ITS REAL LONGITUDES
Drawn from the catalogued radius and from the same properties the picture at the top of this page uses, at the distance a flight to it would stop. The surface is a global map rather than a pattern — a mosaic of real images, wrapped on by latitude and longitude. It is drawn with a cloud layer that is one composite sky rather than tonight's weather, saturated in colour by its publisher, who also filled the gaps in its coverage. Longitude zero on it is laid where longitude zero on the body actually is at the moment this page was built, so a feature is drawn where the feature is. The maps come from NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center and NASA Earth Observatory/NOAA NGDC, in the public domain; and from Solar System Scope, under CC BY 4.0. Drag it, or use the arrow keys, to look from another direction. The stars behind are the 498,631 this catalogue holds real distances for, at their real positions and drawn from where the camera actually is — so the constellations are wrong, and that is the point. This is the sky from there, not the sky from here.
IMAGES
] 4 FRAMES- NASA / Apollo 17 crew
Public domain - Apollo 8 crewmember Bill Anders
Public domain - NASA, Apollo 11
Public domain - NASA
Public domain
OBSERVING
] FROM WHERE YOU AREWhat it takes to see Earth for yourself. Everything in this part of the page is worked out for a real horizon, a real night and the equipment you say you have.
CATALOG DATA
] 14 FIELDSThe raw catalogue values, as the source published them, with the error bars where one was published — sorted by what each set of figures is about rather than by the order they happened to be stored in.
WHAT KIND OF THING IT IS
What the object is in itself, rather than how it happens to look from here.
- Mean temperature
- 15
- Rotation period
- 23.93
- Moons
- 1
HOW BRIGHT IT IS
What the light adds up to, measured through one filter at a time. A magnitude is a brightness on a backwards scale — the smaller the number, the brighter the object.
- Geometric albedo
- 0.367
- Bond albedo
- 0.306
WHERE IT IS AND HOW IT MOVES
Position, motion across the sky and the size it covers on it. These are measurements of the object as seen from here, so every one of them depends on where here is.
- North pole (RA)
- 0
- North pole (Dec)
- 90
THE ORBIT
The shape of the path, where the object sits on it, and the instant those figures were true of. An orbit is a fit to observations and drifts away from the real one either side of its epoch.
- Orbital period
- 365.26
- Eccentricity
- Inclination
- 0
- Longitude of ascending node
- 0
- Longitude of perihelion
- 102.94
- Mean longitude
- 100.46
- Element epoch
- 2451545.0000
ALSO KNOWN AS
] 1 DESIGNATIONS- Common name Earth
CITE THIS PAGE
] DR1This page is live and its numbers move when an upstream refreshes, so the citation names the release the rows belong to rather than the day you read them. The release itself is frozen, republished as a bundle, and is what a data-availability statement should point at.
SpaceCatalog. Earth [catalogue entry]. Data release DR1 (2026-08-21). https://spacecatalog.org/object/earth
@misc{spacecatalog_earth,
author = {{SpaceCatalog}},
title = {{Earth}},
howpublished = {SpaceCatalog, data release DR1 (2026-08-21)},
year = {2026},
url = {https://spacecatalog.org/object/earth},
note = {Catalogue entry, data release DR1 (2026-08-21). Values from SpaceCatalog curated data.}
}The values above were taken from SpaceCatalog curated data — CC-BY-4.0. Citing this page does not replace citing that catalogue.
RECENT ACTIVITY
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