File:Sagan - That's home.jpg

Blue Dot Revisited -- go.nasa.gov/2vpNzHa

February 2020

It's the 30th anniversary of the "Pale Blue Dot" image, and NASA commemorated the incredible feat with a release of the remastered, iconic image... Earth appears as a tiny blue pixel in the universe, suspended in a sunbeam.

Two of the imaging scientists who had been working on the Voyager mission, Carl Sagan and Carolyn Porco, were behind the Voyager taking this photo before it shut down its cameras to conserve power...

Pale Blue Dot

February 2015

On the 25th anniversary of Voyager's 1990 photo of Earth

• https://www.nasa.gov/jpl/voyager/pale-blue-dot-images-turn-25

Valentine's Day is special for NASA's Voyager mission. It was on Feb. 14, 1990, that the Voyager 1 spacecraft looked back at our solar system and snapped the first-ever pictures of the planets from its perch at that time beyond Neptune.

“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 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. 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.

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.”

― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

Oh Planet Citizens

"Preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've got"

"This point of pale light... a lonely speck... distant image of our tiny world"

Looking home from Cassini

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