The Pale Blue Dot never fails to bring tears to my eyes, and over the course of my life I've always been fascinated and moved by photos from outer space.
My earliest memory of extraterrestrial photography was a set of glossy photos that Voyager took of Jupiter, (on its way out of the solar system to V'gerland, natch.) The photos were given to my great grandparents, when they opened a checking account at a long-forgotten local bank in Northridge, specifically to provide their great grandchildren with the packet of photos.
So with that bit of backstory, you may understand why I was pretty damn excited to look at this little-yet-magnificent picture of Jupiter, taken by the Cassini:
It's not a great picture of Jupiter, but that's not the point. The point is that the photograph was taken by NASA's Cassini spacecraft, which is currently orbiting Saturn, approximately 1.8 billion km from Jupiter. A similar picture of Earth would only light up a single pixel in Cassini's camera.I love it. It's like humans can look at that picture and say, "Hey! Look what we did!"
(via Netscape)
