How Nasa got Earth to Photobomb Saturn
Editing the result into something beautiful
On 19 July 2013, Nasa did something slightly unusual — but close to our hearts. The agency told Earthlings to look up and smile.
The occasion was a family photo of the inner solar system, taken from Cassini, orbiting Saturn. From this distance, Earth appears as nothing but a pale blue dot, and the other interior planets don’t fare much better. But it was a rare chance to have the whole family in one photo without the optical interference of the Sun, so Nasa didn’t want to miss it.
For four hours, Cassini snapped more than 300 images using both its wide-angle and narrow-angle cameras aimed at Saturn. The resulting mosaic of shots was edited down the 141 that comprise the image you see above. Mars, Venus, Earth, Saturn and most of their accompanying moons in one photo, shining in the heavens.
Like most family portraits, a bit of Photoshopping was required to get everyone looking their best. As well as narrowing down the selection to just half of the shots captured, it also boosted the brightness of Earth, Venus, Mars, and Saturn’s moons Enceladus, Epimetheus and Pandora by a factor of eight and a half, and Tethys by a factor of four.
The background starfield was brightened by factors ranging from six to sixteen, and the outer rings were brightened between two and eight times relative to the super-bright inner rings. Nasa tactfully says of this touching-up process: “This version was processed for balance and beauty.”
Here’s a fully annotated version, click here for bigger:
It’s not the first time that an image of the Earth has been taken from such a great distance. But it is the first time that Earth has been told first, allowing us to do our hair and put our best duckface on before the snap was taken. As a result, the few pixels representing Earth are probably the best we’ve ever looked from that distance.
Now, over to Carl Sagan to close this one out in style:
Consider again 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.
Looking Up is a collection on Medium that offers a home to those obsessed with the world above our heads. It’s curated by @duncangeere. If you enjoyed it, please click the “recommend” button below, and if you want more, then click the “follow” button to make sure you don’t miss anything we publish in the future.
