"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." -Carl Sagan, "Pale Blue Dot."
The most distant look at Earth is this image taken by Voyager 1 at a distance of nearly 4 billion miles. This image has been called the "Pale Blue Dot" after the title of astronomer Carl Sagan's 1994 book, "Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space." In the image, Earth is located in a light ray that was the result of taking the picture so close to the sun.
NASA's Cassini spacecraft, circling Saturn since 2004, pointed its cameras at Earth on July 19. Cassini is 900 million miles from Earth, yet was able to capture images of both the Earth and the moon using its technology from the 1990s when it lifted off from Earth. Imagine what the images would look like if today's technology was available to it. Just taking the images was difficult. Normally from Saturn, Earth appears close to the sun and Cassini's photographic equipment could be damaged by looking at it. But Cassini had moved to a location where the ringed planet blocked out the sun so it was able to snap the portraits.
