25 years ago, Voyager 1 took a picture of the “pale blue dot”
On February 14, 1990, the Voyager-1 automatic probe, being at a distance of 6.5 billion km from Earth, "looked back" and took 6 photographs of the Solar System. One of them became known as "Pale Blue Dot" or "pale blue dot" - on it you can distinguish a pale blue dot with a size of 0.12 pixels: the planet Earth.
The layout of the "portrait of the solar system" was as follows:
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Although the photo was taken with one wide-angle camera, each of the planets was shot by another one, narrow-angle, with a focal length of 1500 mm, specifically aimed at it. Photos were taken through red, blue and green filters separately, which were later combined. There is no Mars, too dimly lit at the time of the shooting, and also too close to the Sun of Mercury.
The enlarged photo taken by Voyager looks like this:
The characteristic oblong artifact in the photo is diffused sunlight. It turned out this way because of the lengths of exposures taken during the shooting (0.72, 0.48 and 0.72 sec) and the diffraction of light on the extensions of a calibration lamp installed in front of the lens of the wide-angle Voyager camera.
A famous planet scientist and popularizer of science Karl Sagan insisted on the Earth survey from a probe. Based on the photograph, he wrote a heartfelt essay, often compared in emotionality with the performance of Steve Jobs to Stanford graduates:
Take another look at this point. It's here. This is our house. This is us. Everyone you love, everyone you know, everything you have ever heard of, everyone who ever existed lived their lives on it. Many of our pleasures and sufferings, thousands of self-confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and gatherer, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every couple in love, every mother and father, every capable child, the inventor and traveler, every teacher of ethics, every deceitful politician, every "superstar", every "greatest leader", every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived here - on a mote suspended in the sunbeam.
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The Earth is a very small stage on the boundless space arena. Think of the rivers of blood shed by all these generals and emperors, so that, in glory and triumph, they may become short-term masters of a piece of grain. Think of the endless cruelties perpetrated by the inhabitants of one corner of this point over the barely distinguishable inhabitants of another corner. About how frequent the differences between them, about how they crave to kill each other, about how hot their hatred.
Our posturing, our imaginary significance, the illusion of our privileged status in the universe - they all succumb to this point of pale light. Our planet is just a single speck of dust in the surrounding cosmic darkness. In this great emptiness there is not a hint that someone will come to our aid in order to save us from our ignorance.
Earth is the only known world that can sustain life. We have nowhere else to go - at least in the near future. Visit - yes. Colonize - not yet. Whether you like it or not - Earth is now our home.
Astronomy is said to instill modesty and strengthen character. Probably there is no better demonstration of stupid human ignorance than this detached picture of our tiny world. It seems to me that she emphasizes our responsibility, our duty to be kinder to each other, to cherish and cherish the pale blue dot is our only home.
Our posturing, our imaginary significance, the illusion of our privileged status in the universe - they all succumb to this point of pale light. Our planet is just a single speck of dust in the surrounding cosmic darkness. In this great emptiness there is not a hint that someone will come to our aid in order to save us from our ignorance.
Earth is the only known world that can sustain life. We have nowhere else to go - at least in the near future. Visit - yes. Colonize - not yet. Whether you like it or not - Earth is now our home.
Astronomy is said to instill modesty and strengthen character. Probably there is no better demonstration of stupid human ignorance than this detached picture of our tiny world. It seems to me that she emphasizes our responsibility, our duty to be kinder to each other, to cherish and cherish the pale blue dot is our only home.
Video of Sagan's speech in Russian translation:
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/365123/
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