From the remote vantage point of Saturn, planet Earth seems mighty small and insignificant. Yet the first interplanetary portrait to be taken in natural colour is a stark reminder of how alone and potentially vulnerable we are in the vastness of space.

The series of snaps was taken early last Saturday by NASA's Saturn-orbiting space probe, Cassini, from a distance of 1.44 billion kilometres.

Space shot: This image taken on July 19, 2013, the wide-angle camera on NASA's Cassini spacecraft has captured Saturn's rings and our planet Earth and its moon in the same frame. Credit:NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute

The images – facilitated by a unique version of an outer solar system eclipse in which the sun's glowing dial hid safely behind Saturn – are short on detail. Earth, after all, shows up as a trifling 1.5 pixels wide, with the illuminated part less than a pixel across.

The Earth images, perhaps more art than science, will eventually form part of a mosaic, or multi-image gallery, of the Saturnian system being composed by Cassini, named after the Italian astronomer who made discoveries about the ringed planet and its multiple moons.