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Our Pale Blue Dot: Redux
| quote: | Not since the Voyager 1 spacecraft saw our home as a pale blue dot from beyond the orbit of Neptune has Earth been imaged in color from the outer solar system. Now, Cassini casts powerful eyes on our home planet, and captures the Earth, a pale blue orb--and a faint suggestion of our Moon--among the glories of the Saturn system.
The Earth is captured here in a natural color portrait made possible by the passing of Saturn directly in front of the Sun from Cassini’s point of view. At the distance of Saturn’s orbit, Earth is too narrowly separated from the Sun for the spacecraft to safely point its cameras and other instruments toward its birthplace without protection from the sun’s glare.
The Earth-Moon system is visible as a bright blue point on the right side of the image above center. Here, Cassini is looking down on the Atlantic Ocean and the western coast of north Africa. The phase angle of the Earth, seen from Cassini is about 30 degrees.
A magnified view of the image taken through the clear filter shows the Moon as a dim protrusion to the upper left of the Earth. Seen from the outer solar system through Cassini’s cameras, the entire expanse of direct human experience, so far, is nothing more than a few pixels across.
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At this time, Cassini was nearly 1.5 billion kilometers (930 million miles) from Earth. |
http://ciclops.org/view.php?id=2235
And because this thread wouldn't be complete without the immortal words of Carl Sagan (referring to the earlier Voyager picture):
| quote: | We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every 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 in 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 the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. 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. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, 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 and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known. |
Humbling, is it not? 
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http://eschatonnow.blogspot.com/
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