Thousands of astronomy fans looked to the heavens and posed for a unique picture on Friday afternoon – a shot of planet Earth from Saturn.

The first photos are are just being transmitted back now – but anyone who participated in the ‘Day the Earth Smiled’ shouldn’t hope to see their face. This was, after all, a 898million-mile photo op.

The photos, some of which have been enhanced by astronomers, show Earth as a tiny dot – only a little bigger than the North Star appears in our sky – illuminating the skies beyond Saturn.

The images were taken by the Cassini spacecraft, which has been orbiting the ringed giant since its arrival in the Saturn system in 2004.

The Earth has only been pictured in images from outer space on two other occasions. The first was  in 1990, when Voyager 1 captured an image from 3.7 billion miles away. The second occasion was when Cassini took a photo in 2006 from 926 million miles away.

The raw images of Earth that arrived back home from Saturn on Saturday were raw and not easy for the average layman to decipher. The images showed both wide and narrow-angle views and different shots were taken with different color filters, additionally, Cassini moved slightly in between shots.

Guillermo Abramson, a physicist at Argentina’s BarilocheAtomicCenter, tweeted a zoomed-in shot of Earth – as seen from nearly 900million miles away.

The main purpose of the photograph is to study any changes in Saturn’s rings, after an 2006 image showed possible changes.