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Earth from Saturn
From NASA:
Not since NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft saw our home as a pale blue dot from beyond the orbit of Neptune has Earth been imaged in color from the outer solar system. Now, Cassini casts powerful eyes on our home planet, and captures Earth, a pale blue orb -- and a faint suggestion of our moon -- among the glories of the Saturn system.
Earth is captured here in a natural color portrait made possible by the passing of Saturn directly in front of the sun from Cassini's point of view. At the distance of Saturn's orbit, Earth is too narrowly separated from the sun for the spacecraft to safely point its cameras and other instruments toward its birthplace without protection from the sun's glare. ...
At this time, Cassini was nearly 1.5 billion kilometers (930 million miles) from Earth.
The inset in the upper left is a magnified view of the dot in the upper right quadrant of the full picture.
By the way, you can see Saturn's rings with a rather modest telescope. The telescope I got for my ninth birthday was nothing special, but it was enough to see Saturn with its rings, and Jupiter with its moons.
4 comments:
That is a thought-provoking picture. It's quite a ride we're taking on the spaceship earth. I'm glad we're on it.
As a grad student, I borrowed the department's total station surveying equipment for field work. The total station includes a small built-in telescope for locating the reflecting rod at great distances. When I pointed the total station at Saturn one night, I was able to see its rings. I was also able to see Jupiter's Galilean satellites.
This picture reminded me of Moses' statement in Moses 1:10, "...Now for this cause I know that man is nothing, which thing I never had supposed." I'm sure this is only a drop in the bucket of the the "ends therof" that he got to see! It's kind of humbling to think that our existence is just some remote star to an observer across the galaxy. Maybe we've been named after someone's girlfriend...
Very cool.
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