parting shot
“I
t 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
COURTESY OF NASA/JPL
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. Earth lies right in the center of one of the scattered
light rays resulting from taking the image so close to the sun.
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