According to NASA's Cassini Solstice Mission website, the positioning of the planets of the sun will allow for a once-in-a-lifetime photo opportunity of Saturn in July for the first time in seven years, Mashable reports.
When the sun back-lights the planet on July 19, you will be able to clearly see, photograph and observe Saturn's wings and changes over the past year. In addition, a shot of Earth from Saturn 898 million miles away will be possible, allowing for a clear photograph of Earth that will be the third of its kind in U.S. space travel history. In 1990, the first shot of Earth from Saturn was taken 4 billion miles away from the Voyager 1, the second taken from Cassini in 2006, from 926 million miles away.
NASA posted directions for how to wave at Saturn from Earth on July 19, and is encouraging people to capture and send in their own photographs of Saturn which will be compiled into a collage for its official website.
"Cassini's image of Earth will be just 1.5 pixels wide, with the illuminated part of Earth less than a pixel, so the resulting mosaic will not actually show people or the continents," reads NASA's site. "But if you are on the sunlit side of Earth at the time - North America and part of the Atlantic Ocean - you are in the picture. The western part of Africa and Europe will also be facing Cassini's cameras, but they will be dark."
In his book "Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space," Carl Sagan paid tribute to the iconic 1990 photo of Earth snapped from the Voyager 1, according to the Los Angeles Times.
"That's us," he wrote. "On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every 'superstar,' every 'supreme leader', every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there - on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam."
NASA is also promoting a #waveatsaturn hashtag on Twitter, as well as a Wave at Saturn group on Flickr and Facebook.
The Cassini portrait of Earth's session is expected to last around 15 minutes, beginning at 5:27 p.m. ET on July 19.
