Image of the day: What Earth looks like from Saturn

NASA has just released images of the Earth and moon from the point of view of the Cassini spacecraft, which is orbiting Saturn 898 million miles away. The earth is the blue dot located center right; the moon can somewhat be seen as a fainter protrusion off the planet’s right side. 

Scientists say that the purpose of the picture is to pay homage to the original “Pale Blue Dot” image, which was captured by the Voyager 1 probe in 1990.

The new, wide-angle image is actually part of a much larger mosaic that imaging scientists stitched together in order to visualize the entire Saturn system.

Generally speaking, pictures of Earth from space are few and far between (three to date so far), let alone those that are taken at a distance of nearly a billion miles away. The reason has to do with how close the planet is to the sun. Similar to how a person can damage his / her eyes by looking at the sun, a camera’s sensitive detectors can be damaged to by the sun’s rays.

The images above were taken when the sun had moved behind Saturn from Cassini’s point of view. This blocked out most of the light.

Story via: nasa.gov