Cassini Probe

[PeteC]

Can you find the earth?

_68899568_68899412.jpg (6.34 KiB) Viewed 741 times

The Earth and the Moon pictured from a billion miles away

The positions of the objects are inside the circles. The squares contain enlarged views

Earth and the Moon are seen as a blue dot at the bottom right of the image


Some fantastic photos and story at the below links.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-23419543
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24913141

[pharvey]

Quite incredible really. Hard to comprehend seeing the earth from that distance.

Thanks for posting Pete.

[Chromeman]

Yes, those are great pictures and show how small and insignificant Earth is in the big picture...

It also reminds me off the famous picture taken by the Voyager 1 spaceprobe in 1990 from a distance of 6 billion kilometers or 3.7 billion miles from Earth and the famous Pale Blue Dot thoughts that Carl Sagan published in a book, and also did a recording of.

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity – in all this vastness – there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known, so far, to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

You can see the Pale Blue Dot picture here.

[Stargeezer]

Seeing Earth from Saturn makes me hopeful that more Aliens won't find us for a while yet.
It is nice to see our little blue dot from that far away. I think the Icy gang on Pluto will say,
Who Cares! That planet thinks this planet is just a dwarf now! Is there an astronomy club in Hua Hin?
Stargeezer