The Day the Earth Smiled

[Borklund]

Couldn't find a suitable thread so I'm going to go ahead and create a new one. I'm sure you're all familiar with this famous picture of Saturn taken by Cassini in 2006. Well, seven years later it's time for another one only this time Cassini will be looking up at Saturn and its rings with the Earth visible in the lower right hand corner. There was an event on July 19, Wave at Saturn, when Cassini took a series of 33 pictures to form a giant mosaic to be released at some point in the not too distant future.

While we wait for that, NASA has released a sneak peek:

Here is a zoomed in version of the same picture, with Earth annotated

In this rare image taken on July 19, 2013, the wide-angle camera on NASA's Cassini spacecraft has captured Saturn's rings and our planet Earth and its moon in the same frame. It is only one footprint in a mosaic of 33 footprints covering the entire Saturn ring system (including Saturn itself). At each footprint, images were taken in different spectral filters for a total of 323 images: some were taken for scientific purposes and some to produce a natural color mosaic. This is the only wide-angle footprint that has the Earth-moon system in it.

You'll find the full press release with more info here:

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/multimedia/pia17171.html

You can also find close-ups of the Earth and Moon here and a narrow-angle camera shot here.

[bsalis]

Epic.

It does not looks safe, with the Earth just out there in the vast empty space.

[allmappedout]

It's beautiful. It really does look just like a sci-fi design like that. I'm curious as to what the blue tinting in the foreground is though..

[Kilmeister]

View of Earth from Mercury on the same day. B/W though.

[Borklund]

I removed the arrow from the desktop sized picture. You can find it here.