Holy superpositions Batman!

It's been awhile since I've seen anything really nifty to blog about in the astronomical world. Either that or I just haven't had time to write up the more lengthy astronomical posts I did this summer, but this happened to catch my eye today.

If humans ever do end up going out and exploring our solar system, they might just get homesick and find themselves looking home. The Cassini spacecraft, out visiting Saturn, did just that recently. So what does the Earth look like from 1.5 billion miles away?

Not much.



Earth and the almost resolved moon are shown in the inset in the upper left, and amidst Saturn's rings to the right of center in the main image. Pretty insignificant in the big scale of things.

But if that's not enough for you, check out today's APOD:



What are those two little dots? Its the ISS and shuttle Atlantis sillouhetted against the sun. As the Bad Astronomer points out, the transit lasted less than a second, but astrophotographer Thierry Legault knows his stuff.