A photo of Earth taken by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft on Friday July 19. Cassini is in orbit around Saturn, and at the time of the long-distance photo shoot, it was about 898.5 million miles from Earth.
That is pretty cool. Did you wave? We were supposed to wave. I see from the pic that I blinked, as usual…
I wished I was that far away from this place, maybe there is some sanity out there . . .
That’s really cool. Really puts our obscurity into perspective when looking back toward Earth, rather than out into space.
Thanks for posting that.
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Yep, that’s me on the left, behind the guy in the hat.
More info here: http://www.latimes.com/news/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-earth-cassini-photos-20130722,0,1800495.story
Unannotated photo.
Cool stuff. And for the sake of reference:
The Pale Blue dot taken by Voyager 1 some 4 billion plus miles from earth.
From far enough away we are indistinguishable from a ‘stuck’ pixel on a camera sensor.
I’m not saying NASA doesn’t know what they’re doing.
But how the hell do they know thats Earth?
I’m going to go out on a limb and it is because they know how to do math. 
Except when doing conversions from English to Metric (remember the Mars Climate Orbiter?)
BTW, great picture. Thanks for the post.
Touche’ my friend. That was a bit comical.
I’m curious as to how photoshopped that image is.
I understand it gets a bit chilly out there…
What I want to know is how the hell they take an image and send it all the way back here. I struggle to email a photo to a friend across town.
Not for Dr. Manhattan, or Chewbacca for that matter.
My guess is their available bandwidth is just a bit larger than cable’s!! 
I didn’t know that you were glowing blue and naked.
Or covered in really thick fur and naked.
:eek:
It is blue.
This is the one taken by Messenger near Mercury and is pretty cool since you can see the moon too.
http://www.space.com/11952-latest-photos-mercury-nasa-messenger-probe-part2.html
Quick aside but I really wish our gov would really unfuck themselves and put NASA back to doing what they do best. Advancing mankinds advancement into the cosmos. I mean I can’t begin to imagine the pride, the sense of desire, the devotion that we as a nation and the world for that matter felt during the 50’s and 60’s when we went to the moon and did so with technology less advanced that what you’d find in a modern day microwave oven… It must have simply been incredible to have witnessed. It pains me to think we we could become again if we were to endeavor upon such a dream again. Be it a manned voyage to mars or something else. Something to capture the imagination of a generation and make people want to become more and do something of value because it is so challenging.
Great speech on the topic fwiw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErZq2ZQQTrs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNxnCzz5oQE (starts around the 2:20 mark)
Truely an amazing photograph. For some amazing words, read the following from Carl Sagan…
Look again at that dot. 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. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, 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 endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.
From Carl Sagan’s “Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space.”