Chris Lintott’s Universe

I think out of everything we do, I most enjoy talking about Mars and Saturn. The missions to both have brought back amazing pictures over the last few years, and it’s great that for the last program of the first 50 years of the Sky at Night, we’re going to back to Saturn. The latest results from Cassini are incredible and in John Zarnecki and Michele Dougherty we have two of our best interviewees.

It’s on Sunday night, on BBC2 at 23.45, followed by the extended edition on BBC 4 on Monday evening at 7pm (repeated at 00:50 in the early hours of Tuesday).

I’ve been talking a lot recently about the impact of seeing the Earth as a planet for the first time; perhaps the most enduring legacy of Apollo is the image that we all have of a round Earth hanging in space. Interestingly, it seems that this wasn’t something the astronauts had particularly thought about seeing (concentrating instead on what the Moon itself would look like) but it is something that appears in their accounts time and time again. For a later generation, Carl Sagan’s magnificent description of a ‘Pale Blue Dot’ as seen by Voyager will stick in the mind.

Well, we have another image. Cassini, now in orbit around Saturn, has just captured the first colour image of the Earth from the outer solar system to be taken for twenty years or so. It’s stunning to see our planet in perspective like this, isn’t it?

Oh, and go and vote for the incredible aurora picture in the BBC’s photographic competition, please.