SOME PERSPECTIVE
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All Earth History, Life that ever was, is, and will be… Is on this little Dot!

Now that is a Noodle Wrapper!

(Alec Baldwin Narrates)

For only the third time ever, Earth has been photographed from the outer Solar System. At a distance of 898 million miles, as seen by NASA’s Saturn-orbiting Cassini satellite, the Earth is a tiny, almost luminescent blue marble — or, perhaps, a not-quite-so-pale blue dot. If you zoom in (image below), you can even see the pale speck of the Moon next to Earth. As luck would have it, at almost exactly the same time, NASA’s MESSENGER satellite also captured an image of the Earth and Moon — this time from the inner Solar System, orbiting around Mercury (image below).

The complete photo above (download the 1920×0180 wallpaper) is a mosaic of 33 different images captured over 15 minutes on Friday afternoon, July 19. In almost ten years of orbiting Saturn, Cassini has only had the opportunity to image Earth twice — and this time, in a cute bit of public relations, NASA actually issued a press release asking the denizens of Earth to smile and wave while the photo was being captured. In short, if you waved at around 16:30 EST on July 19, there’s a chance that Cassini captured some photons bouncing off your arm — or, to put it another way, if Cassini was equipped with a gazillionjiggerpixel sensor, you’d be able to zoom in and resolve your smiling face.

FULL SCOOP AND MORE PHOTOS HERE
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