I am a native in this world And think in it as a native thinks

Tuesday, June 14, 2022

Astronomy Tuesday




That's Saturn of course, in the foreground, in another wonderful image taken by the Cassini probe in 2014.

But if you look closely at the background, you'll see a tiny blue dot in the upper left corner. That's Uranus, which was approximately 28.6 astronomical units away from Cassini and Saturn when this picture was taken. One astronomical unit is the distance from the Earth to the Sun, or 93,000,000 miles, so if I'm doing the calculation correctly, Uranus was billions of miles away and it's miraculous that we can see it here at all.

The only thing that amazes me as much as this universe is the human ingenuity that allows us to see so much of it.

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute

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