1.2 Billion Kilometres

This is a photo I took at an oil well site in Weld County, Colorado. I had a few free minutes and I was looking up at the sky, as I often did way out there on the prairie. Denver and the cities along the Front Range obscured most of the stars with their light pollution, but out there it was simply stunning to take in. I did this nearly every night for many months at a time when I worked night shift.

Nothing really shows up in this quick snap I took from my phone, but if you look closely toward the top-right of the photo, you can make out this one singular yellow dot. That's Saturn. Saturn is 1.2 billion kilometres from Earth. I mentioned this fact one evening while we were all working hard to get at that oil we all crave so much of, hidden several kilometres below us...no one else on the pad really seemed to care. But just think of it!

The light from the Sun takes 8 minutes and 20 seconds to travel the roughly 150 million kilometres to get to Earth, but the light coming from that pale yellow dot in this photo traveled an additional 1.2 billion km and back! Hurtling across the void at the speed of light, it took more than 2 hours for photons from the Sun to reach that huge mass of hydrogen and bounce back to me.