A Different View...

We are all use to seeing those gorgeous pictures of Saturn, with its great golden warm color, and vibrant glowing rings and the incredible black shadow of its bulk thrown across those rings.

Saturn

However, the Cassini Space Probe has taken a picture of Saturn from a different view - "behind" it, with the enormous body of the planet eclipsing the sun. It is a stunningly, profoundly different viewpoint, dark and mysterious...

Cassini Probe picture of Saturn eclipsing the sun...

Color enhancement of the photograph shows something that, yes, you can see in the non-enhanced picture, to  the left and a little down of the thin haze of the outer rings...a small blue sphere which is...

Earth...

Color enhanced view - Earth is to the left of the planet down from the outer rings...

I did some widgeting (yes, that is a technical term) with the photograph, until I was able to isolate and re-size that area of the photograph that contained Earth...

Earth, seen through the rings of Saturn

How many times have we suddenly seen something from a really different angle of view, and realized that it changed what we knew about something, gave us a new place to stand in the spaces of our lives. How often have we our selves, living on the borderlands, different, our lives eclipsed by our differences, shown someone else by our very being, that different way to see, a new way to think about things?
The Cassini Probe took a journey of 794 million miles to reach Saturn, an incredible distance. It was launched in 1997 and reached orbit around Saturn in 2004, a journey of seven years. I think that the journeys we take in our own hearts as we learn about each other, our diversity, our differences, our similarities, our strengths and our weaknesses are far more infinite, and yield an even greater beauty. May the beauty and power of the universe seen through a different point of view inspire us to always look for the different point of view within.