So did you get out and Wave at Saturn on The Day the Earth Smiled? If you did (and even if you didn’t) here’s how you — and everyone else on Earth — looked to the Cassini spacecraft in orbit around Saturn, 898.4 million miles away.*

As Carl Sagan famously said, “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.” On that bright point of light, the entirety of our world — past and present — resides. And just below it and to the left is the Moon… still to date the farthest that humans have ever physically ventured.

It’s a sobering image, but also quite beautiful… as well as deceiving in its simplicity as only now do humans have the technology to witness the entire planet and its lone moon as such tiny specks of distant light. Still, during the exploration of our solar system, it’s important to take a moment to look back home.

Read more on my Universe Today article here.

*This image is a composite made from raw images acquired in red, green, and blue color channels. Background noise was removed as well as an image artifact streak caused by overexposure. You can see an original image here.