"Pale Blue Dot" Anniversary

We like to celebrate Carl Sagan around these parts, and this past Saturday was the 25th anniversary of Voyager 1's last turn back to Earth to take one final picture before the camera systems were powered down.

Carl Sagan made the suggestion that Voyager 1, because of it's trajectory taking it above the orbital plane of the planets in our solar system, take one last photograph of Earth. There wouldn't be any real scientific purpose, since it would appear far too small to discern any detail. The philosophical implications, Sagan argued, would be significant.

Many other Voyager team members argued that it would be too dangerous for the photography instruments to take direct pictures of the sun. Eventually Sagan'c camp prevailed, and Voyager turned and snapped a series of pictures that have come to be known as the Family Portrait. Stitched together a viewer can get a sense of the relative positions of each of the planets. The Family Portrait itself is a maddening collection of black squares with solar flares disturbing a few exposures, but a sense of emptiness persists.

I say that Sagan's camp "eventually" won because he made the suggestion in 1980, and they decided to make it happen in 1989, and only by 1990 had the equipment ready to turn back and take the shot. Afterwards, all photographic equipment was powered down as the satellite would not be coming into close proximity with any other large object for the duration of it's icy power cells. It needed to save it's juice for other data collecting, seeing as how it is the furthest man-made object from Earth, the only thing we've ever sent beyond the solar system.

Here you go, the furthest photograph from earth, from over three-billion miles away...that's us, the pale blue dot in the orange band of refracted light caused by the camera lens: