Around 300 people showed up at the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles on July 19 to wave at the Cassini spacecraft as it took a picture of Earth almost 900 million miles away according to The Los Angeles Times.
Cassini was set to take multiple pictures during a 15 minute time span to study Saturn's rings to try determining when the sun will be backlighting the planet.
Earth just happens to be in-between one of Saturn's rings, providing a rare opportunity to see our planet from a unique setting according to USA Today.
Earth will look like a small, blue dot between the rings of Saturn in the picture, so don't expect to see yourself if you waved during the photo shoot according to NASA.
"While Earth will be only about a pixel in size from Cassini's vantage point, the team is looking forward to giving the world a chance to see what their home looks like from Saturn," Linda Spilker, Cassini project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, said in a press statement.
Taking pictures of Earth from the outer solar system is a difficult challenge since the sun can blind certain spacecraft cameras.
The chance to take a photo this week was only possible because Cassini was in Saturn's shadow according to NASA.
It will take a couple of weeks before the photos are released to the public according to the L.A. Times.
Only two other photos similar to the one being taken today exists: one from 1990 called "Pale Blue Dot" taken from Voyager 1, which was 4 billion miles away, and another that Cassini took in 2006 from 926 million miles away.
Scientists will now compare the new photo with the one taken in 2006 to compare how Saturn's rings have changed according to the L.A. Times.
"I just thought it would be a fantastic moment, a fantastic opportunity, if we could do it again, do it right, make sure the pictures are the correct camera settings, correct filters, all that stuff, do it right and let everybody know in advance so this could become a kind of interplanetary salute between robot and maker," said Carolyn Porco, the leader of the Cassini imaging team at the Space Science Institute in Colorado, to CBS News.
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