This image of Saturn released by NASA earlier this week
really does drive home the fact that our planet and all of us are impossibly
tiny on a universal scale (and this is just the view from our own solar
system). Strange and (to me anyway) oddly comforting all at the same time. It's
breathtaking to think of how much joy, misery, life can all be happening in
such profusion across our planet - and that, from a distance, you'd be completely unaware, very
likely never even know Earth exists.
This single image of Saturn consists of 141 wide-angle images
taken by NASA's Cassini spacecraft. In addition to showing how Saturn would look to the human eye, it also shows Saturn and its inner ring system, as
well as Earth, Venus and Mars, in stunning detail.
This photo is part of the “Wave at Saturn” campaign NASA
launched this past summer. Announcing
that it would be shooting an image of Earth from Saturn, NASA invited the
public to find Saturn in the sky, wave at the ringed planet, and share pictures via the Internet while Cassini simultaneously captured these images. “In this one magnificent view, Cassini has
delivered to us a universe of marvels,” Carolyn Porco, Cassini’s imaging
team lead said of this image. “And it did so on a day people
all over the world, in unison, smiled in celebration at the sheer joy of being
alive on a pale blue dot.”
Photos released by NASA, November 2013
Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI
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