30 years of "Pale Blue Dot", one of the most iconic photo in history

By Luke86 | Astrofacts | 17 Mar 2020

It was shot in 1990 by Voyager 1 probe, leaving the Solar System

Do you know how big is a single pixel? Well, now imagine to shot a photo in which your house is smaller than a pixel. You would feel very very little, wouldn't you? And what do you think if a I tell that this photo has been really took about not you single house, but the house of all of us?

Can you see it? That very little dot on the left, above the yellow trail? Yes, it's the Earth, it's home! This picture is called "The Pale Blue Dot"

The hystory

The twin probes, Voyager 1 and 2, actually the furthest man-made objects in the Universe, were launched in 1977 to explore and to study the external Solar System. While Voyager 2 was able to travel toward Neptune (absolutely amazing for that time, but possible through a very lucky position of the planets), Voyager 1 left the Solar System after having studied Jupiter and Saturn. At that time there was a man, counselor for NASA, astronomer and writer, Mr Carl Sagan. He strongly suggested NASA an idea: taking a picture of entire Solar System when Voyager 1 would have reached a sufficient distance to take it.

The "Family Portrait"

Told and made it! At approximately 6 billions of km Voyager 1 reversed its cameras and took 60 photos of our Solar System: only Mercury, due to the closeness to the Sun, and Mars, due to its position causing a bad light-reflection on the camera sensor, are not visible. All this pictures were shot between the 14th of February and the 6th of June 1990. In one of these pictures, even the Earth were photographed and its size is...

0,13 pixels! 7 billions people in 0,13 pixels!

The Sagan's words

In 1994 Carl Sagan wrote a book "The Pale Blue Dot:a vision of the human future in Space" described this photo with a very deep a reflective words, on which we all have to think about, especially in this precise moment, with a planetary pandemic all around the globe.

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it 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.

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 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 this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, 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.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

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.