Two views of home

These images show views of Earth and the Moon from the international Cassini spacecraft (left) and NASA’s Messenger spacecraft (right) from 19 July 2013.

In the Cassini image, the wide-angle camera has captured Saturn’s rings and our planet Earth and Moon in the same frame. Earth, which is 1.44 billion km away in this image, appears as a blue dot at centre right; the Moon can be seen as a fainter protrusion off its right side. An arrow indicates their location.

In the Messenger image, Earth and the Moon appear as a pair of bright star-like features. Messenger was at a distance of 98 million km from Earth when it took this image with the wide-angle camera of the Mercury Dual Imaging System.

The Cassini–Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, ESA and Italy’s ASI space agency. The Cassini orbiter and its two cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. Messenger was designed and built by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md.