That bright speck you see in the bottom-right quadrant, just below Saturn's rings, isn't a far-off star or galaxy cluster; it's a little place called Earth. On July 19, 2013, NASA's Cassini spacecraft snapped the above photo of our blue marble (and its hard-to-see moon) from its perch in the Saturn system, nearly 900 million miles away.
That we're even looking at this image is quite fortuitous: Photos typically taken from that distance and direction are usually obscured by the sun, which, luckily, is hidden behind Saturn. And while we've grown accustomed to images of Earth taken from space, swirling with white clouds over deep blue oceans, Cassini's distant portrait of home is a humbling reminder that we live in a great big universe — and that we're all really, really puny.
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Chris Gayomali is the science and technology editor for TheWeek.com. Previously, he was a tech reporter at TIME. His work has also appeared in Men's Journal, Esquire, and The Atlantic, among other places. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook.
