Seti Khan, this week on planetary radio.

Welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier.

I'm at Kaplan of the Planetary Society. It was the first major public conference dedicated

to the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. We'll take you there for a sampling of the

outstanding speakers and events.

You'll hear CEDI researcher Jill Tartar,

CEDI pioneer Frank Drake, and astronomer writer and radio

host, Seth Shostak, among others. Bill Nye called in from his vacation to honor the

SETI Institute's conference and speculate about the future of this ongoing

search and Bruce Bats will drop by to deliver another What's Up Guide to the Night's Sky.

As always, we'll get underway with the Planetary Society Science and Technology Coordinator

and Editor of its blog, Emily Loch Duwala.

Emily, let's start today with an image that certainly made me think of that famous pale blue dot that Carl Sagan referred to.

Yeah, it's interesting that it reminds people of the pale blue dot image because the photo that messenger took of Earth and Moon against a backdrop of stars is taken from the opposite end of the solar system.

It's taken from very close to the sun. And so you see

this this double dot, the double planet of the Earth and Moon lit fully by the Sun

because Messenger is is much closer to the Sun than Earth is. It's a wonderful image and certainly more than a dot.

I mean, you can very easily make out the Earth

and its moon, and it looks a little bit fuzzy around the Earth.

And I assume that's the stuff that's keeping us

alive at the moment. No actually I think that's probably because the earth is so

bright that it's just over-exposed in Messengers camera detector I mean Earth with its white clouds is a very

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