Stargazing Guy

The full quote goes:

“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.”

― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

Credit for Featured image: This narrow-angle colour 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 centre 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 colour filters – violet, blue and green – and recombined to produce the colour image. The background features in the image are artefacts resulting from the magnification.

The pale blue dot narration has to have some of the most profound words uttered in the entire 20th century …

Carl Sagan: Pulitzer Prize-winning author, astronomer and astrochemist shares his thoughts on our place in the Universe. Sagan makes a plea for peace and understanding, but for us to first humble ourselves. To reconsider our global priorities, not as a single nation, but together as humankind.

Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of planet Earth taken on February 14, 1990, by the Voyager 1 space probe from a record distance of about 6 billion kilometers (3.7 billion miles, 40.5 AU), as part of the Family Portrait series of images of the Solar System.

In the photograph, Earth’s apparent size is less than a pixel; the planet appears as a tiny dot against the vastness of space, among bands of sunlight scattered by the camera’s optics.

Voyager 1, which had completed its primary mission and was leaving the Solar System, was commanded by NASA to turn its camera around and take one last photograph of Earth across a great expanse of space, at the request of astronomer and author Carl Sagan.

Carl Sagan, Planetary Society co-founder, unveils the Pale Blue Dot image at a press conference on the Voyager missions in 1990.

Carl Sagan, Planetary Society co-founder, unveils the Pale Blue Dot image at a press conference on the Voyager missions in 1990. Music by General Fuzz Join us: http://planet.ly/joinus

PS: I love coffee. BuyMeACoffee, leave a message with a date and time and we can share it, remotely, at the same time, and think about the Cosmos.

In the meantime, take care of yourself and if you can, someone else, too, because as Adam Smith said, “we naturally desire not only to be loved but to be lovely”.