According to a report in the British newspaper The Independent, the image,’ taken four months ago from the Cassini spacecraft and actually a mosaic of images, shows Saturn eclipsing the sun, with Mars, Venus and Earth all appearing as tiny dots besides the second largest planet in the solar system.’
According to the report, ‘the photograph is partly a tribute to the famous ‘Pale Blue Dot’ image taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft in 1990. As the craft prepared to leave the solar system US astronomer Carl Sagan requested that it take a ‘last look back’, photographing the Earth as a ‘fraction of a dot’ in the vastness of space.’
‘Consider again that dot,’ wrote Sagan in 1997. ‘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.’
According to the report, ‘the photograph is partly a tribute to the famous ‘Pale Blue Dot’ image taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft in 1990. As the craft prepared to leave the solar system US astronomer Carl Sagan requested that it take a ‘last look back’, photographing the Earth as a ‘fraction of a dot’ in the vastness of space.’
‘Consider again that dot,’ wrote Sagan in 1997. ‘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.’