pale blue dot

i tripped over this website and, well, liked this little collection of pics with descriptions.

especially this one:

'"pale blue dot" is the name of THIS famous voyager 1 photograph of earth, and the title of a book by carl sagan inspired by the photo. on february 14, 1990, NASA commanded the voyager 1 spacecraft, having completed its primary mission, to turn around to photograph the planets it had visited. NASA ultimately compiled 60 images from this unique event into a mosaic of the solar system. one image voyager returned was of earth, 4 billion miles distant, showing up as a "pale blue dot" in the grainy photo. britt describes the distance as "more than 4 billion miles". the picture was taken using a narrow-angle camera at 32º above the ecliptic, and created using blue, green, and violet filters. narrow-angle cameras, as opposed to wide-angle cameras, are equipped to photograph specific details in an area of interest. in addition, only 0.12 pixels represents earth in the photo.

click pic to source

sagan said the famous earthrise picture taking during the apollo 8 mission, showing the entire earth above the moon, forced humans to step back and see the earth as just a part of the universe. in the spirit of that realization, sagan said he pushed for voyager to take a photo of the earth from its vantage point on the edge of the solar system.

there was danger to the spacecraft's optics from the nearby sun. voyager took similar pictures of venus, jupiter, saturn, uranus and neptune. thus the pale blue dot photo was part of a "portait" of the solar system that was created by voyager 1.'

the following is an excerpt from a commencement address delivered in 1996 and one of the most memorable things carl sagan has ever written:

"reflections on a mote of dust

we succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. that's here. that's home. that's us. on it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. the aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every 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 in 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 the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. 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. it is up to us. it's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and i might add, a character-building experience. to my mind, 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 and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."

carl sagan gave the world spirituality its most beautiful and worthwhile meaning.

you can download a lovely poster with the text and pictures here.

more posts on my pale blue dot label.