Humans have often looked into the sky and seen Saturn, but never have we known what our Earth would look from the vantage point of that planet. Well, now we do. As usual, it’s the pale blue dot in the sky. Saturn is 900 million miles from Earth, and the Cassini spacecraft has been hanging out with the beautiful ringed planet for a while now.
It isn’t easy to photograph Earth from that distance because of its proximity to the sun, and Cassini’s camera detectors could face trouble if they looked directly into sunlight. To get around the problem, the spacecraft patiently waited till Saturn was covering the sun, and then sneaked a photograph.
Another image comes from the Messenger probe that has been hanging around Mercury. This image (last image in the article) shows both the Earth and the Moon, they appear larger than their actual size in the black and white image because the image was overexposed to capture as much light as possible. Messenger is 61 million miles away, but its camera would have missed Earth and Moon without overexposure as both are smaller than a pixel on Messenger’s camera.
Via cnet
