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The "pale blue dot" photo. It shows three or four colored beams of light – optical artifacts – passing from the left side of the image to the right. The background is dark, empty space. In the topmost light beam is a single pale blue pixel. That's Earth. Sagan's quote is printed on the image. It reads ""We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history..."

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The "pale blue dot" photo. It shows three or four colored beams of light – optical artifacts – passing from the left side of the image to the right. The background is dark, empty space. In the topmost light beam is a single pale blue pixel. That's Earth. Sagan's quote is printed on the image. It reads ""We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history..."
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Robert McNees (mcnees@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 05-Sep-2023 18:32:03 UTC Robert McNees
in reply to

The frame containing Earth shows a dramatic optical artifact because we are near the Sun in the camera's field of view.
That's the Pale Blue Dot. Suspended in a sunbeam, captured from a distance of 40 AU by a probe out on the edge of darkness.
After that, mission scientists turned off Voyager 1's cameras to save power.
Image: NASA/JPL

In conversation about a year ago from mastodon.social permalink