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Pale Blue Dot

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This article is about the photograph taken from space. For the book related to this photograph, see Pale Blue Dot (book). For the album by Benn Jordan, see Pale Blue Dot (album).
Dark grey and black static with coloured vertical rainbow beams over part of the image. A small pale blue point of light is barely visible.
Seen from 6.1 billion kilometers (3.7 billion miles), Earth appears as a tiny dot (the blueish-white speck approximately halfway down the brown band to the right) within the darkness of deep space.

The Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of planet Earth taken in 1990 by Voyager 1 from a record distance, showing it against the vastness of space. By request of Carl Sagan, NASA commanded the Voyager 1 spacecraft, having completed its primary mission and now leaving the Solar System, to turn its camera around and to take a photograph of Earth across a great expanse of space.

Subsequently, the title of the photograph was used by Sagan as the primary title of his 1994 book, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space.[1]

Photograph

Diagram of solar system with an area outside the orbit of Pluto highlighted
The approximate location of Voyager 1 while the photograph was taken is shown in green

Voyager 1 was launched on September 5, 1977. Sagan had pushed for Voyager to take a photograph of the Earth when its vantage point reached the edge of the solar system.[2][3][4][5]

On February 14, 1990, having completed its primary mission, the spacecraft was commanded by NASA to turn around to photograph the planets of the Solar System.[4][5][6][7] Between February 14, 1990 and June 6, 1990, one image Voyager returned was of Earth, showing up as a "pale blue dot" in the grainy photograph.[2][8] [9]

According to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory HORIZONS software system,[10] the distances between Voyager and the Earth during this time were as follows:

Distance of the Voyager 1 Spacecraft from Earth
Unit of Measurement February 14, 1990 June 9, 1990
Astronomical Units 40.4722269111071 40.6835761263791
Kilometres 6,054,558,968 6,086,176,360
Miles 3,762,136,324 3,781,782,502

The picture was taken using a narrow-angle camera at 32° above the ecliptic and it was created using blue, green, and violet filters.[11] Narrow-angle cameras, as opposed to wide-angle cameras, are equipped to photograph specific details in an area of interest.[12] The light band over Earth is an artifact of sunlight scattering in the camera's optics, resulting from the small angle between the Earth and the Sun.[5][8] Earth takes up less than a single pixel—NASA says "only 0.12 pixel in size."[11]

Images of six planets, each from such a great distance they only appear as points of light.
The assembled "family portrait" of the Solar system taken at a great distance by Voyager 1

Voyager took similar photographs of Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. When assembled as shown to the right, they create a "portrait" of most of the Solar System.[11] Mercury's proximity to the Sun prevented it from being photographed and Mars was not visible due to the effect of sunlight on the camera's optics.[13] NASA compiled sixty images produced into a mosaic called the Family Portrait.

Reflections by Sagan

In the book, Sagan related his thoughts on a deeper meaning of the photograph:[4][14]

Pale blue dot image with a wider field of view to show more background
Sagan points out that "all of human history has happened on that tiny pixel, which is our only home" (speech at Cornell University, October 13th 1994, shown here inside a blue circle).

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of particular interest. But for us, it's different. Look again at that dot. That's here, that's home, that's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. 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 civilization, 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.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

See also

References

  1. ^ Sagan, Carl (1994). Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1st edition ed.). New York: Random House. ISBN 0-679-43841-6. {{cite book}}: |edition= has extra text (help)
  2. ^ a b Sagan. "Chapter 1. You Are Here". Pale Blue Dot. The quote is much copied elsewhere on the web.
  3. ^ Sagan, Carl (2000). Carl Sagan's Cosmic Connection: An Extraterrestrial Perspective. Cambridge University Press. p. XV. ISBN 0521783038, 9780521783033. {{cite book}}: Check |isbn= value: invalid character (help); More than one of |pages= and |page= specified (help); Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
  4. ^ a b c Bennett, Jeffrey O. (2008). Beyond UFOs: The Search for Extraterrestrial Life and Its Astonishing Implications for Our Future. Princeton University Press. p. 211. ISBN 691135495, 9780691135496. {{cite book}}: Check |isbn= value: invalid character (help)
  5. ^ a b c Von Baeyer, Hans Christian (2000). Taming the Atom: The Emergence of the Visible Microworld. Courier Dover Publications. p. Xxi. ISBN 0486414477, 9780486414478. {{cite book}}: Check |isbn= value: invalid character (help); More than one of |pages= and |page= specified (help)
  6. ^ "Pale Blue Dot". The Planetary Society. Retrieved 2006-07-27.
  7. ^ Cockell, Charles (2003). Impossible Extinction: Natural Catastrophes and the Supremacy of the Microbial World. Cambridge University Press. p. 24. ISBN 0521817366, 9780521817363. {{cite book}}: Check |isbn= value: invalid character (help); More than one of |pages= and |page= specified (help)
  8. ^ a b Gonzalez, Guillermo (2004). The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos is Designed for Discovery. Regnery Publishing. p. X,224. ISBN 0895260654, 9780895260659. {{cite book}}: Check |isbn= value: invalid character (help); More than one of |pages= and |page= specified (help); Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
  9. ^ Visible Earth: A catalog of NASA images and animations of our home planet. Retrieved 2009-02-28
  10. ^ NASA's JPL Horizon System for calculating ephemerides for solar system bodies
  11. ^ a b c "Solar System Portrait – Earth as 'Pale Blue Dot'". NASA. Cite error: The named reference "VisibleEarth" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
  12. ^ "SPACECRAFT – Cassini Orbiter Instruments – ISS". NASA.
  13. ^ "Solar System Portrait – Views of 6 Planets". NASA.
  14. ^ "Reflections on a Mote of Dust". Retrieved 2007-04-07.
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