For countless millennia we’ve been marveling at the objects that we see when we look skyward - trying to make sense of what they are, the role they play and how we fit in and among them. Through trial and error we concluded that maybe if we took certain steps, the clouds would gather and release the rains when we needed it (but just enough - not too much). The clusters of twinkling lights that we see in the night sky - maybe those are characters caught up in a morality play. Perhaps the fire blazing in our daytime sky rules over all - while we exist at the center of it all. In the past few hundred years, we’ve built upon the observations and calculations of those that came before us - the ancient Egyptians/Mesopotamians, Greeks, Chinese and Native American cultures - to the point where within the first 11 months of my life, humans twice visited/orbited the moon and - on our third visit - set foot on the moon. Less than a decade later, we sent two missions in opposite directions to explore our solar system. The first of the two Voyager crafts - 13 years after leaving Earth and before turning off its camera - turned around, gazed through Saturn’s rings and snapped the top image (dubbed by Carl Sagan as the “Pale Blue Dot”). In 1997, we sent Cassini toward Saturn. After its seven year journey, it settled into an orbit around Saturn and shot the bottom image (home is the brightest dot down and to the right of Saturn’s rings). If either craft had a cockpit in which we could travel, I imagine our journey into the cosmos might sound something like this. Bon voyage.

Voyager Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Cassini Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute