Earth & Saturn from Cassini

Astounding picture from Cassini of Saturn! This is an actual picture, with the Sun illuminating Saturn's ring system from behind. Can you see a tiny dot on the left-hand side just inside the next-to-last outer ring? That's not a moon...that's planet Earth!

 

Home Sweet Home

The brightest little sparkle,
with the smaller barren Luna to its right,
is home to all of us,
and everyone we've ever known or heard of.
It is the home of all of human history;
of every ancestor of every human;
of every known insect,
vertebrate,
bacterium,
diatom,
virus,
or cartoon character;
of every human thought,
invention,
fantasy,
emotion;
of every word ever spoken;
of every murder and all kindnesses; of every war and every turned cheek;
of every kiss;
of every curse;
Washington, Mao, Elizabeth I,
Hitler, Gaddafi, Herod,
Ceasar, Alexander, Monctezuma, Tutankhamun,
Curie, Einstein, Galileo,
Twain, Shakespeare, Aesop,
Jesus, Mohammed, Abraham,
Erickson, Columbus, Armstrong
... all romped on its surface as children.

The water planet.Our little blue oasis.
Home sweet home.

(The photo was taken May 6, 2010 by the Messenger spacecraft during its mission around the planet Mercury. Messenger is busy mapping Mercury and searching for asteroids in the inner solar system. It giving us the first new close-up information from Mercury since Mariner 10, thirty years ago.)

Reclassification

The former planet, Pluto, patron saint of children, has been officially kicked out of the heavenly pantheon of planets and downgraded to "dwarf planet" along with the former asteroid, Ceres, and Pluto's slightly larger and much more distant Kuiper Belt fellow, 2003UB313. (Click on image to see a larger version.)

It occurs to me that if a dwarf "planet" can be recognized as such and downgraded, something could be done to properly label a dwarf president. What do you think?