Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot

Astronomer Carl Sagan was a consultant and adviser to NASA beginning in the 1950s. Among several spacecraft he helped design was Voyager 1, which completed its primary mission in 1990. One of the last instructions sent to the spacecraft was for it to take photos of all the planets. This photo of earth from 4 billion miles away has become one of the most popular photographs of our time. From Voyager's great distance Earth is a mere point of light, less than the size of a pixel. (Earth was a crescent only 0.12 pixel in size.) In a coincidence of geometry and optics, Earth lies in the center of one of the scattered light rays resulting from pointing the camera so near the sun.

 

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Excerpt:
"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."
-Carl Sagan, “Pale Blue Dot,” 1994