This composite photograph of Saturn was assembled from images taken by the Cassini orbiter on 19 July 2013 — a single frame from the spacecraft's 13-year mission orbiting the planet (2004-2017). The orbital geometry of this exposure put Saturn between the Sun and the spacecraft, so the planet's rings are backlit by the Sun and the planet itself is in eclipse-darkness on the side facing Cassini. In the original full frame, Earth appears as a single pale-blue pixel at lower right between the rings.

The Cassini-Huygens mission was a joint NASA / ESA / Italian Space Agency mission launched in 1997, arriving at Saturn in 2004. The mission delivered the Huygens probe to the surface of Saturn's moon Titan in January 2005 — the first and only landing on a body in the outer solar system — and orbited Saturn studying its rings, atmosphere, magnetic field, and moons for thirteen years before being deliberately destroyed in Saturn's atmosphere on 15 September 2017 to prevent any biological contamination of potentially habitable moons.

The image is in the public domain under NASA release terms. The Cassini photographic archive is one of the largest single bodies of scientific photographs of a non-Earth body and is the visual foundation for current understanding of the Saturnian system.