Pale blue dot
"Suspended in a sunbeam..."
"This point of pale light... a lonely speck... distant image of our tiny world"
February 2020
Iconic ‘pale blue dot’ photo – Carl Sagan’s idea – turns 30
..."preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've got"
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"Our posturings, our imagined self-importance,
the delusion that we may have some privileged position,
are challenged by this point of pale light.
Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark ....
There is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
This distant image of our tiny world...
underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another,
and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've got."
--Carl Sagan
Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1-7, 331-4
File:Pale Blue Dot - The Book by Carl Sagan.jpg
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Earth between the rings of Saturn...
- Image taken July 19, 2013 with a wide-angle camera on NASA's Cassini spacecraft capturing Saturn's rings and our planet Earth and Moon
In this rare image taken on 19 July, the wide-angle camera on the international Cassini spacecraft has captured Saturn’s rings and our planet Earth and Moon in the same frame.
The dark side of Saturn, its bright limb, the main rings, the F ring, and the G and E rings are clearly seen; the limb of Saturn and the F ring are overexposed. The ‘breaks’ in the brightness of Saturn’s limb are due to the shadows of the rings on the globe of Saturn, preventing sunlight from shining through the atmosphere in those regions. The E and G rings have been brightened for better visibility.
Earth, 1.44 billion km away in this image, appears as a blue dot at centre right; the Moon can be seen as a fainter protrusion off its right side. The other bright dots nearby are stars.
This is only the third time ever that Earth has been imaged from the outer Solar System. The first image was taken by NASA’s Voyager-1 in 1990 and famously titled “Pale Blue Dot”.
In 2006, Cassini imaged Earth in the stunning and unique mosaic of Saturn called “In Saturn's Shadow – The Pale Blue Dot”.
-- European Space Agency / ESA
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