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The pale blue dot
1990
Portrait of the solar system, showing Earth as a 'pale blue dot'.
1990
Portrait of the solar system, showing Earth as a 'pale blue dot'.
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.
Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot (1994)
Inspired by an image taken by Voyager 1 on 14 February 1990, while about 4 billion miles away from the Earth, astronomer and humanist Carl Sagan wrote of our ‘lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark’, which underscored ‘our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot’ known as Earth: a clarion call to take better care not just of one another, but of the planet itself.
The original image was captured by the Voyager 1 space probe in 1990, and described by NASA as:
This narrow-angle color image of the Earth, dubbed ‘Pale Blue Dot’, is a part of the first ever ‘portrait’ of the solar system taken by Voyager 1. The spacecraft acquired a total of 60 frames for a mosaic of the solar system from a distance of more than 4 billion miles from Earth and about 32 degrees above the ecliptic. From Voyager’s great distance Earth is a mere point of light, less than the size of a picture element even in the narrow-angle camera. Earth was a crescent only 0.12 pixel in size. Coincidentally, Earth lies right in the center of one of the scattered light rays resulting from taking the image so close to the sun. This blown-up image of the Earth was taken through three color filters — violet, blue and green — and recombined to produce the color image. The background features in the image are artifacts resulting from the magnification.
Solar System Portrait – Earth as ‘Pale Blue Dot’, NASA Visible Earth