NASA / JPL-Caltech / SSI

The planet Venus sparkles as a bright point of light, seen through the rings of Saturn, in this image from NASA's Cassini orbiter. Venus is the speck just above and to the right of the image's center. The picture was captured on Nov. 10, 2012.

NASA's Cassini spacecraft has been sending us eye-filling pictures of the giant planet Saturn for almost nine years, but every so often, the camera also sees the small fry of the solar system — such as Venus, which shines in the two latest offerings from the Cassini imaging team.

One of the photos, captured last November, shows Venus as seen through Saturn's gossamer rings, from a distance of 884 million miles (1.42 billion kilometers, or 9.51 AU). The other picture highlights Venus as a "morning star," hanging just beyond Saturn's edge and next to the giant planet's G ring. Venus was 849 million miles (1.37 billion kilometers, or 9.13 AU) away when that picture was taken in January, according to the imaging team. 

From such a distance, Venus looks like nothing more than a bright speck. Which isn't surprising, considering that Earth takes on pretty much the same appearance from Saturn, even though it's slightly bigger. The mind-boggling perspectives involved in space vistas led the late astronomer Carl Sagan to call our home planet a "pale blue dot," and I guess that makes Venus a pale yellow dot.

Venus looks lovely from millions of miles away, but it's not a place you'd want to visit, Carolyn Porco, the leader of the imaging team at the Colorado-based Space Science Institute, said in an email:

"Along with Mercury, Earth, and Mars, Venus is one of the rocky 'terrestrial' planets in the solar system that orbit relatively close to the sun," she wrote. "It has an atmosphere of carbon dioxide that reaches nearly 900 degrees Fahrenheit (500 degrees Celsius), a surface pressure 100 times that of Earth's, and is covered in thick, white sulfuric acid clouds, making it very bright. Despite a thoroughly hellish environment that would melt lead, Venus is considered a twin of our planet because of their similar sizes, masses, rocky compositions and close orbits.

"Think about Venus the next time you find yourself reveling in the thriving flora, balmy breezes, and temperate climate of a lovely day on Earth, and remember: You could be somewhere else!"

NASA / JPL-Caltech / SSI

Dawn on Saturn is greeted across the vastness of interplanetary space by the morning star, Venus, in this image from Cassini. Venus appears just off the edge of the planet, in the upper part of the image, directly above the white streak of Saturn's G ring. Lower down, Saturn's E ring makes an appearance. A bright spot near the E ring is a distant star. This picture was captured on Jan. 4, at a distance of about 371,000 miles (597,000 kilometers) from Saturn.

Slideshow: Best of Cassini

The Cassini spacecraft is sending back unprecedented imagery of Saturn, its rings and its moons. Click "Launch" to see some of the greatest hits from the Cassini mission.

Launch slideshow

More about Saturn and Venus:

• Space missions deliver treats from Saturn and beyond
• Solar particles moving at incredible speed near Saturn
• Venus can take on a 'cometlike' atmosphere
• Flash interactive: Guide to the new solar system 

Slideshow: Month in Space

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Thierry Legault / Astrophoto.fr

French astrophotographer Thierry Legault captured this view of the Hubble Space Telescope passing over the sun's disk during this week's transit of Venus. The circles highlight the Hubble on multiple exposures taken every tenth of a second during the telescope's 0.9-second transit.

Over the past few days, we've seen lots of amazing photos showing Venus' last-in-a-lifetime crossing of the sun, but this shot of the Hubble Space Telescope zooming past Venus may be the only picture of its kind.

It's actually a combination of photographs, snapped every tenth of a second by master astrophotographer Thierry Legault. Nine speck-sized images of Hubble are highlighted with circles in the image. Legault, who is famed for his pictures of spacecraft transits across the sun, traveled from his home base in France to northern Australia for the shot.

After conducting the calculations with CalSky software, Legault made sure he was in Queensland at 01:42:25 UTC June 6, pointing his Takahashi FSQ-106ED telescope at the sun with the proper filters attached. "Thanks to the continuous shooting mode of the Nikon D4 DSLR running at 10 fps [frames per second], nine images of the HST were recorded during its 0.9s transit (1/8000s, 100 iso, raw mode). Turbulence was moderate to high," Legault reported on his website.

You read that right: While it took Venus more than six hours to inch its way in front of the solar disk, the Hubble Space Telescope zipped across in just nine-tenths of a second. Imagine how disappointing it would have been to have a cloud in the way at that moment!

Legault is promising more pictures of Venus, taken during the transit and afterward. But it'll be hard to match this one. The next transit of Venus won't occur until the year 2117, and even though Hubble has long outlasted its projected lifetime, the space telescope will surely be sent down to its fiery doom by then. So chances are this is the only picture that will ever be taken of Hubble and Venus simultaneously silhouetted by the sun.

By the way, Hubble was conducting its own transit tasks during Venus' crossing. Hubble focused on the moon and analyzed  the reflected sunlight to find out how easy it will be for future telescopes to pick out the spectral signature of Earthlike planets passing over alien suns. Stay tuned for more about the results of that experiment.

Where in the Cosmos
This picture served as today's photo puzzle for our "Where in the Cosmos" contest, open to Cosmic Log Facebook followers. It took just a couple of minutes for Ollie Nanyes to tell me what those little specks represented. For being so quick on the draw, I'm sending Nanyes a pair of 3-D glasses donated by Microsoft Research's WorldWide Telescope project. Kent Avery, the runner-up in the guessing game, is getting 3-D specs as well. (Microsoft is a partner along with NBC Universal in the msnbc.com joint venture.)

The cardboard-and-cellophane glasses I'm sending Nanyes and Avery will be wrapped up in a 3-D picture of yours truly, but there are other, more interesting 3-D space pictures online. This Cosmic Log 3-D archive points you to some stunners. Click the "like" button on the Cosmic Log Facebook page, and you too may be eligible for some 3-D glasses goodness in the weeks to come. Just for fun, go full-screen on this simulated 3-D view of the transit from the National Solar Observatory Integrated Synoptic Program:

More wonders from Thierry Legault:

• Falling satellite seen from Earth
• Last looks at the shuttle in orbit
• Spaceships get their day in the sun
• Sun gets double-crossed
• Still more from Legault's website

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

For the last time in 105 years, Earthlings and astronauts watched the planet Venus creep across the surface of the sun during a nearly seven-hour transit.

The prime viewing zone took in most of the Americas, the Pacific and Asia. But even if you weren't in the transit zone itself, or even if the weather was lousy (as it was for me in the Seattle area), you could get in on the action over the Internet, thanks to NASA and more than a dozen other webcasters. Pictures and videos were streaming in, from around the globe as well as from the orbiting International Space Station. Here's a sampling:

NASA via Reuters

An image from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory shows the planet Venus in the midst of crossing over the edge of the sun's disk, as seen from Earth, at the beginning of its last-in-a-lifetime transit.

Don Pettit / NASA

This is one of the first pictures of a transit of Venus taken by an astronaut in outer space. NASA astronaut Don Pettit snapped the picture through a solar filter from the International Space Station. Check Johnson Space Center's Flickr gallery for more views from space.

NASA via Reuters

An extreme ultraviolet picture of the sun from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory shows the planet Venus in transit, as well as dramatic swirls of solar activity.

Andrew Burton / Getty Images

New Yorkers observe the last-in-a-lifetime transit of Venus from the High Line park.

Stan Honda / AFP - Getty Images

Clouds partially obscure the sun during the transit of Venus, as seen from New York's Riverside Park.

Andy Clark / Reuters

Astronomer Raminder Samra tries to get the view of Venus crossing the Sun using a shadow on a piece of paper and the telescope at the MacMillan Southam Observatory in Vancouver, British Columbia. Unfortunately, cloud cover prevented a proper view of celestial event.

Submitted by Robert Wetzel / UGC

Robert Wetzel sent in this picture of the Venus transit from San Diego, using msnbc.com's FirstPerson photo-sharing tool. The picture was taken using a Celestron G5 telescope and a Nikon D300 camera with a solar filter. Focal length is approximately 1875mm.

NASA / SDO, HMI

Multiple images from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory were combined to produce this picture tracking Venus' path from one side of the sun to the other.

The first scientific observation of a Venus transit took place in 1639, and there have been six other transits since then. Because of the orbital mechanics of our solar system, Venus can be seen crossing the sun's disk from Earth in pairs of occurrences separated by eight years. There are gaps of either 105.5 or 121.5 years between one pair and the next. One transit took place in 2004, and today's crossing was the second transit of the pair. The next transit won't be seen until the year 2117 — thus, this was the last event of its kind that anyone alive today is likely to see.

Scientifically speaking, the most important moments came when Venus crossed the edge of the sun's disk. That's when the sunlight refracted by Venus' atmosphere could be most easily detected, revealing the atmosphere's chemical signature. Astronomers eventually hope to use a similar technique to analyze the atmosphere of Earthlike planets passing across alien suns, so this transit provided a good practice run for the technique. Even the Hubble Space Telescope tried out the method, checking the characteristics of the sunlight reflected by the moon during the transit. We'll be hearing more about the results of those experiments in the weeks ahead.

But there's more than science involved here: Sue Ah Chim, a researcher at the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute in South Korea, told The Associated Press that he hoped the transit would lead people to see life from a larger perspective and "not get caught up in their small, everyday problems."

"When you think about it from the context of the universe, 105 years is a very short period of time, and the earth is only a small, pale blue spot," he said.

At Los Angeles' Griffith Observatory, Jamie Jetton and her two nephews from Arizona, aged 6 and 11, sported sun-viewing glasses as the followed the transit. "It's an experience," she told AP. "It's something we'll talk about for the rest of our lives."

More about the transit:

• Last-minute guide to the transit of Venus
• VenusTransit app enables cosmic calculations
• Scientists spread out to watch Venus transit
• Venus transit may help spot alien planets

More places for pictures:

• NASA's Venus Transit Observing Challenge on Flickr
• SpaceWeather.com's real-time image gallery
• Space.com: Transit of Venus gallery

Update for 11:35 a.m. ET: I initially wrote that Pettit's groundbreaking pictures were "the first pictures of a transit of Venus taken from outer space," but Facebook friend Jarin Udom pointed out that several sun-watching probes, including NASA's mighty Solar Dynamics Observatory, have taken plenty of such pictures previously. So it's more accurate to say these were the first pictures taken by a photographer in outer space.

Got pictures? Use the FirstPerson photo upload tool to share your transit photos with us. They may show up in a gallery today or on Wednesday.

Last updated 1:45 a.m. ET June 6.

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Jeff Berkes Photography

Jupiter, the moon and Venus take starring roles in a sunset sky extravaganza, as captured by photographer Jeff Berkes in Pennsylvania's Chester County.

The glitterati of the solar system turned out this past weekend for an Oscar-worthy show: a triple play featuring Jupiter, the moon and Venus in evening skies. This photo, snapped by photographer Jeff Berkes in Pennsylvania's Chester County, is a classic portrayal.

"The crescent moon, Venus and Jupiter have formed a slim triangle in the western skies at sunset," Berkes told me in an email on Sunday. That's not all: Mars rises in the east a few hours after sunset. This sky guide from Space.com's Tariq Malik provides the details. Even if the skies are cloudy all night, you can still get in on the fun online via Slooh.com's planet-watching webcast.

The moon is shifting progressively farther to the east in evening skies, but anytime this week should be prime time for the planetary extravaganza. Got great pictures? Share them via the Cosmic Log Facebook page or msnbc.com's FirstPerson in-box. You'll also want to get a look at the beauties on Jeff Berkes' website as well as at SpaceWeather.com and Space.com.

Update for 7:30 p.m. ET Feb. 27: NBC News' Brian Williams featured a beautiful time-lapse view of Venus, Jupiter and the moon that was captured on Friday night by Roberto Porto on the road to Teide National Park in Tenerife in the Canary Islands. Check it out:

More from Jeff Berkes on PhotoBlog:

• Catch a falling star ... and fall colors
• Meteor quest turns up treasures