When you look up at the sky , on a clear dark night , you ’re sometimes favourable enough to catch glimpses of other planets . They seem small , insignificant , surreal . Guess what ? That ’s exactly how we look to them . Here ’s our pallid blue dot , from Saturn . You might have to squinch .
The above icon was releasedtoday by NASA ; it was taken by the Cassini spacecraft , some 900 million mile from home . It ’s as stark a reminder as any of our place in the solar system , just one small star in someone else ’s sky .
It ’s also a rarefied find ; it ’s very hard to capture scene of the Earth from this distance because we ’re so relatively close to the Sun . Pointing sensible detectors in unmediated view of that much luminance does n’t result in much of an image As NASA explain , this aspect come during an opportune moment , when Saturn had slipped behind the sunlight and harbour the purview .
require to feel even small ? Here ’s the Earth next to the moon , also from Cassini :
This hopefully also wo n’t be the last we see of Earth from Cassini ; the craftsmanship has been orbiting Saturn since 2004 , hit the books its rings , moon , and neighboring planets . But however much data point it wrings from Titan and Jupiter , it may turn out that its most crucial contribution isperspective . [ NASA ]
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