“It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience,” he concluded. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.” There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Sagan noted that “Earth is the only world known so far to harbour life. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilisation, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there–on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” Voyager 1’s perspective is shown here, along with the series of snapshots required to capture six of the solar system’s planets in a one-of-a-kind family portrait. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.
Sagan’s description of the scene remains an equally iconic homage to humanity’s home. The tiny dot of light is seen “suspended in a sunbeam,” Sagan wrote, referring to an internal reflection in Voyager 1’s camera system.įor the 30th anniversary of the iconic image, modern photo-processing techniques were employed “while respecting the intent of those who planned the image,” according to a Jet Propulsion Laboratory statement. The image of Earth, unresolved and less than a single pixel across, became known as the “Pale Blue Dot,” the title of a book by Sagan and a phrase he used to describe humanity’s home in the vastness of space. The snapshot was part of a “family portrait” of the solar system, a farewell set of 60 images showing Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter, Earth, Venus and the Sun, a whimsical project inspired by the late planetary scientist Carl Sagan, a member of the Voyager imaging team. On 14 February 1990, just 34 minutes before Voyager 1’s cameras were powered down forever in an effort to conserve power, the spacecraft captured an image of Earth some 6 billion kilometres (3.7 billion miles) away. The iconic image was reprocessed to mark its 30th anniversary.
Earth – a pale blue dot “suspended in a sunbeam” – as imaged by the Voyager 1 spacecraft.
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