From Earth to the Solar System: The pale blue dot
The Pale Blue Dot: This iconic image was taken by NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft from a distance of almost 4 billion miles from Earth. The dot can be faintly seen about halfway down the orange stripe on the right. (Click on image to enlarge.) In the words of Carl Sagan, who requested that NASA turn the spacecraft around in 1990 to take the image across the greatest extent of space yet traveled, on this dot “…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.” Image Credit: NASA
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Posted: 16 August 2011
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Categories:
Air and Space Museum , Astrophysical Observatory , Spotlight
