Art-enhanced Life imitates Art

When passing by Jupiter on the way to Pluto, the New Horizons space probe took a "tourist's picture" of the moon Europa just beyond the edge of the gas giant itself. Some of the many impressed comments I saw about the picture declared it had a "Kubrickian" flavour to it.

Then, I noticed a colourised version of the picture on the New Horizons site. My first thought was to remember that the short exposures used to show a world in the full light of the sun won't show the stars, and to wonder if the picture has been poetically "stretched" beyond the bounds of plausibility... and then a different thought, connecting it to a different movie, occurred to me. Turn the picture upside down and mirror it, and all of a sudden you've got an excellent match for the approach to Yavin from Star Wars. I decided it was worth replacing one of my journal pictures for: after all, we've all heard about the moon of Saturn with the big crater in it...