This Is Earth From 900 Billion Miles Away

NASA's Cassini snapped this photo of Earth and the moon from 898,410,414 miles away as the spacecraft orbited Saturn on July 19.

Earth is the bright object near the center of the photo with the moon just below it. This is the "raw" unprocessed image that came directly from the Cassini spacecraft and onto the web. The Cassini imaging team will process the image, combining various filters and using both narrow-angle and wide-angle views of Earth. Their version will be released later Monday

The Cassini Earth portrait is only the third image taken of our planet from the outer solar system. The historic photo is part of a larger project to create a highly detailed multi-image photo of Saturn at a point when the planet is backlit by the sun and illuminated for ultimate visibility