04/11/2023
On Feb. 14th, 1990, NASAs Voyager 1 space probe while nearing her journey and preparing to leave our solar system,turned to capture an image of home. Revealing Earth as nothing more than a pixel, one small single speck of light in a beam of sun at a distance of roughly 4 billion miles!Astronomer Carl Sagan was part of the Voyager imagining team and proposed having the space craft take such a image. Later in Sagans book titled “Pale Blue Dot:A Vision of the Human Future in Space” he shares his reasoning and why he wished to capture such an image. He shares that he wanted to continue in the tradition of famous earth rising photos captured during the Apollo program, specifically Apollo 17. He then continues,” It seemed to me that another picture of the Earth, this one taken from a hundred times further away, might help in the continuing process of revealing to ourselves our true circumstances and condition. It had been well understood by the scientists and philosophers of classical antiquity that the Earth was a mere point in a vast encompassing Cosmos, but no one had ever seen it as such. Here was our first chance.”
They took the chance and generated an image that when combined with the words of Sagan amazed the entire planet and sparked imagination and wonder into the minds of an entire generation.
