I have always thought that the image called the Pale Blue Dot was taken on a flyby of the moon by the crew of the Apollo spacecraft. This is the image we all remember. It was taken aboard Apollo 8 by Bill Anders, showing earth peeking out from beyond the lunar surface as the spacecraft circumnavigated the moon, with astronauts Anders, Frank Borman, and Jim Lovell aboard. On Christmas Eve 1968 as the Apollo 8 spacecraft rounded the dark side of the moon for a fourth time. The dialog onboard went like this:
Anders: Oh my God! Look at that picture over there! There’s the Earth coming up. Wow, that’s pretty.
Borman: Hey, don’t take that, it’s not scheduled. (joking)
Anders: (laughs) You got a color film, Jim?
Hand me that roll of color quick, would you…
Lovell: Oh man, that’s great!
Amazing stuff. However, it is not the actual Pale Blue Dot photo. I was listening to a podcast last week about the Voyager spacecraft missions. The Voyagers were designed and built out of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena California. Voyager – Mission Overview (nasa.gov) I was honored a few years back to be given a tour of that facility, and saw models of those original Voyager Spacecraft, as well as the actual mission control rooms.
They were launched in 1977 to take advantage of a favorable alignment of the two gas giants Jupiter and Saturn and the ice giants, Uranus and Neptune, to fly near them while collecting data for transmission back to Earth. After launch, the decision was made to send Voyager 2 near Uranus and Neptune to collect data for transmission back to Earth. And then they continued heading outbound on their travels, finally reaching the edge of the solar system, out into interstellar space.
In 1990 as the first Voyager sped away, the cameras were essentially turned off to preserve instrumentation functions, Carl Sagan, who was a principle scientific advisor for the missions, asked that they turn the cameras one more time toward the earth and take a last picture. The Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of Earth taken Feb. 14, 1990, by NASA’s Voyager 1, at a distance of 3.7 billion miles from the Sun. The image also inspired the title of scientist Carl Sagan’s book, “Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space,” in which he wrote: “Look again at that dot. That is here. That is home. That’s us.” All I can say is wow to all of that. The Pale Blue Dot – Revisited – NASA Science
Sagan’s full commentary follows: “Look again at that dot. That is here. That is 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 posturing’s, 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.”
A sobering yet thoughtful and inspiring message about our place in this larger universe.
And more, closer to home within this pale blue dot, a quote from the book: Gilead, Marilynne Robinson: “Joy… As I walked up to …church. There was a young couple strolling a half a block ahead of me. The sun came up brilliantly after a heavy rain, and the trees were glistening and very wet. On some impulse, plain exuberance I suppose, the fellow jumped up and caught hold of a branch, and a storm of luminous water came pouring down on the two of them, and they laughed and took off running, the girl sweeping water off her hair and her dress as if she were a little bit disgusted, but she wasn’t. It was a beautiful thing to see, like something from a myth. I wish I had paid more attention to this.. My list of regrets may seem unusual, but who can know what they are, really. This is an interesting planet. It deserves all of the attention you can give it.”
Look for the beauty in every day, and I will too.
