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Showing posts from October, 2016

The Pale Blue Dot

Image
On February 14, 1990, Voyager 1 turned around from a distance close to 4 billion miles away (which is 40 times as far as the Sun from Earth), and took a last look at us. You see Earth below, next to the red arrow, as a mere pixel suspended in the sunbeam scatter of the photograph. From NASA: " 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 ta