Earth from a distance.

See that pale blue dot? Yea the one with the arrow pointing at it. That my friend is home to everyone and everything you know and love. The image was taken by the Cassini spacecraft on the 19^th of July 900 million miles away! Cassini was launched on October 15^th 1997 atop a Titan IV-B booster and arrived at Saturn on July 14^th 2004.The spacecraft  was able to take this wonderful image by taking advantage of a rare total eclipse of the sun from Saturn. The eclipse allowed Cassini’s super sensitive cameras to snap the photo without risk of damaging its optical sensors due to direct sunlight. Kinda puts things into perspective doesn't it? From this far out earth is just another point of light in the vastness of space almost indistinguishable to surrounding stars. This isn't the first time that earth has been photographed from distance, various spacecraft have done so over the years. In fact the MESSENGER spacecraft that currently orbits mercury snapped a photo of earth and its moon at about the same time that Cassini did. The Voyager 1 probe now on its way out of the solar system also captured an image of earth known as the “pale blue dot”, the image was taken in 1990 from a distance of 3.7 billion miles.