A Small Unregarded Yellow Sun
I saw this over at Independent Sources this morning, and had to post it here:
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the
Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.
Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an
utterly insignificant little blue-green planet…– Douglas Adams, “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”
Click to Enlarge
Wow!
This was taken from Cassini, as it travels far and away:
With giant Saturn hanging in the blackness and sheltering Cassini from the sun’s blinding glare, the spacecraft viewed the rings as never before, revealing previously unknown faint rings and even glimpsing its home world.
This marvelous panoramic view was created by combining a total of 165 images taken by the Cassini wide-angle camera over nearly three hours on Sept. 15, 2006. The full mosaic consists of three rows of nine wide-angle camera footprints; only a portion of the full mosaic is shown here. Color in the view was created by digitally compositing ultraviolet, infrared and clear filter images and was then adjusted to resemble natural color.
The mosaic images were acquired as the spacecraft drifted in the darkness of Saturn’s shadow for about 12 hours, allowing a multitude of unique observations of the microscopic particles that compose Saturn’s faint rings.
Ring structures containing these tiny particles brighten substantially at high phase angles: i.e., viewing angles where the sun is almost directly behind the objects being imaged.
If you look closely, you can see Earth… just a Pale Blue Dot
…quite humbling.
Wow. That is truely awe inspiring
Comment by Grumpy Teacher — November 9, 2006 @ 11:11:22 AM
I like your take on it.
Comment by insider — November 9, 2006 @ 12:08:06 PM
[...] Update: Jeremy Gilby does us one better on this story. [...]
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