Just a couple of tiny, pale dots. Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot and Physicist David Nadlinger's Single Atom in an Ion Trap
The top image is a view from the Cassini spacecraft, looking back across billions of miles of space through the rings of Saturn. That tiny, bright blue pixel pointed out by the arrow is Earth.
This is Carl Sagan’s famous "Pale Blue Dot." Every human who ever lived, every war fought, every triumph, and everything you have ever known took place on that single, fragile pixel suspended in a vast cosmic dark. From Saturn's perspective, our entire world is just a stray speck of dust caught in a sunbeam.
The bottom image is almost the exact opposite. That tiny glowing speck in the center is "Single Atom in an Ion Trap," a famous, award-winning photograph captured by physicist David Nadlinger at the University of Oxford.
A single, positively charged strontium atom suspended between those two metal electrodes. It is held near-motionless by electric fields and illuminated by a blue-violet laser. The atom absorbs and re-emits the laser light so rapidly that a standard camera can actually capture its glow on film. It is a single basic building block of matter, made visible to the human eye with a Canon 5D Mark II with a long exposure.