# 25th Anniversary of the Pale Blue Dot Photo



## Ashvin (Aug 21, 2012)

Today is the 25th anniversary of the Pale Blue Dot photo, which was an image of the Earth taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft on February 14, 1990 at a distance of 40 Astronomical Units (40 AU - 1 AU is the distance from the Earth to the Sun, which is 93 million miles or 150 million kilometers) or 3.7 billion miles or 6 billion kilometers away from the Sun. This is the average distance that Pluto orbits the Sun, and this photo remains to this day the most distant image of the Earth ever taken. To commemorate this anniversary, I wanted to add a Wikipedia link to the page that talks about the photo and to include some images of the photo as well. 

Here is the Wikipedia page for the photo:
Pale Blue Dot - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Here is the original, actual Pale Blue Dot image:








The Earth is the bluish-white dot located in the reddish-brown sun ray just under the left-center of the image.

Below is another version of the photo, this time showing space closer to its natural black color with the image itself rotated 90 degrees to the left:








I also wanted to include a "motivational poster" that I made about this image, even though it's not actually about motivation but just showing a perspective of the Earth that a hypothetical "alien" would see as it enters the solar system. This image is below:








In recent years, specifically September 2006 and July 2013, the Cassini spacecraft in orbit around Saturn took pictures of the planet as it was eclipsing the Sun, and it managed to capture images of the Earth as well, from 930 million miles away/1.5 billion kilometers away in the 2006 image to 900 million miles away/1.44 billion kilometers away in the 2013 image. I made a couple of side-by-side montages of both images, with the 2006 image on the left and the 2013 image on the right, showing the portions of those images that display the Earth. In the 2006 image, the Earth is at the 10 o'clock position just to the upper left of Saturn's rings, and in the 2013 image, the Earth is at the 4 o'clock position, just to the lower right of Saturn and below the planet's rings. Below are the two image montages that I made:








and








In July of this year, the New Horizons spacecraft will fly by Pluto, becoming the first human-made object to do so. Later, perhaps in January 2019, it will fly by a Kuiper-Belt object. I've recently wondered about the possibility that this spacecraft could also take a picture of the Earth after it completes its flyby of the Kuiper-Belt object. Specifically, I've thought about a couple of possible opportunities that it could do so:

1) I think it has one opportunity to take a picture of the Earth when it is at a distance of 50 AU or 4.7 billion miles or 7.5 billion kilometers from the Sun, sometime around April 4, 2021.

2) I think it has another opportunity to take a picture of the Earth when it is at a distance of 54 AU or 5 billion miles or 8 billion kilometers from the Sun, which is very close to the outer edge of the Kuiper-Belt, sometime around October 4, 2022.

From New Horizon's perspective/vantage point at those distances, the best possible views of the Earth that it can get occur around April 4th and/or October 4th during an Earth year. It is at these times that the Earth, from New Horizon's perspective/vantage point, is at its maximum angular elongation from the Sun, meaning its greatest apparent distance from the Sun. The Earth, during these times, is at its point in its orbit around the Sun when it is least affected by the Sun's glare. This way, it will be at its furthest distance away to minimize the chance of scattered sun rays infiltrating into the photo, like in the Pale Blue Dot image, to therefore hopefully obtain the best possible picture of the Earth. This will also be the point when the Earth will be at half-phase and at its maximum possible brightness as seen from New Horizon's perspective/vantage point. The Earth will appear to be at an apparent magnitude of 6.50, which is near or around the human eye's naked eye limiting magnitude or the naked eye visual acuity limit. 

The distances at which the New Horizon's picture of the Earth can be taken, 50 AU and 54 AU, will set a new record as the furthest, most distant photograph of the Earth ever taken, breaking the record set by the Pale Blue Dot photo taken 25 years ago today, which was 40 AU from the Sun. I personally would love to see such a picture of the Earth from these truly extreme distances, to see how dim and barely visible it would appear, and I hope that New Horizons does in fact take such a picture of the Earth.


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## tanstaafl28 (Sep 10, 2012)

Damn. I was 19 going on 20 then, and an E-3 in the Navy. Seems so damn long ago.


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## Ashvin (Aug 21, 2012)

I also wanted to add a video to this 25th anniversary commemoration:






In my opinion, this is one of the best videos that I've ever seen on Youtube.


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## Killbain (Jan 5, 2012)

Thanks for this post. What an amazing thing these technologies have done. Imagine trying to explain things like this to the people if even 100 years ago.

It is so sad that such amazing things now go almost unnoticed as humans as a species devote their attention to meaningless drivel like religion, celebrities lives and ridiculous "issues" they self create.

The universe doesn't care.........the pale blue dot will still be circling long after we, with our petty squabbles, insane beliefs and petulant egos have gone. Just like it did before we came along


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## Ashvin (Aug 21, 2012)

Killbain said:


> It is so sad that such amazing things now go almost unnoticed as humans as a species devote their attention to meaningless drivel like religion, celebrities lives and ridiculous "issues" they self create.
> 
> The universe doesn't care.........the pale blue dot will still be circling long after we, with our petty squabbles, insane beliefs and petulant egos have gone. Just like it did before we came along


Yep, you nailed it.


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## TwinAnthos (Aug 11, 2014)

@Ashvin , thanks for posting this, I wasn't even aware of that photo's existents untill 5 minutes ago. It's really cool how we really only are such small things in an infinitely large universe.


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## HAL (May 10, 2014)

TwinAnthos said:


> @Ashvin , thanks for posting this, I wasn't even aware of that photo's existents untill 5 minutes ago.


Where are its existents?

Shots fired.


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## incision (May 23, 2010)

It's very much perspective, whether from the outside looking towards the insignificant dot and from the inside, the realisation of the enormity of what we'll never know or even possibly ever conceive. For some reason, this gives me hope and wonder.


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## Ashvin (Aug 21, 2012)

Update, August 4, 2015:

I just wanted to give an update to my original post. In that post I mentioned that I think the New Horizons spacecraft should take a picture of Earth after it flies by the Kuiper Belt object in 2019, taking the picture either at 50AU or 54AU. Apparently, this is NOT going to happen. 

I came across this article in Reddit, https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/3dblnr/could_we_get_another_pale_blue_dot_image_from_new/, that said that according to the New Horizons AMA Question & Answer session in July 2015 (link here: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3d9luh/were_scientists_on_the_nasa_new_horizons_team/ct31u6p), the answer to the question of whether New Horizons will take a "Pale Blue Dot" - like picture of the Earth is NO. According to the New Horizons scientists/project personnel at the AMA, the New Horizons LORRI camera is extremely sensitive and if it turned back to look at the Sun in order to take a picture of the Earth, the Sun would be in the LORRI camera's field of view and its brightness/sunlight would "blow out" that camera. 

Voyager 1 was able to take the original Pale Blue Dot picture in 1990 because its cameras were located on a movable scan platform located at some distance away from the spacecraft. As a result, Voyager 1 could be rotated/maneuvered to use its radio/satellite dish as a sunshield, blocking out the Sun's light, in order to take the picture. This kind of system/setup does not exist with New Horizons and LORRI.


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## KiRrRr (Jul 30, 2015)

TwinAnthos said:


> @Ashvin , thanks for posting this, I wasn't even aware of that photo's existents untill 5 minutes ago. It's really cool how we really only are such small things in an infinitely large universe.


I always like the way Bill Bryson explained the scale of our solar system :

"Most schoolroom charts show the planets coming one after the other at neighborly intervals—the outer giants actually cast shadows over each other in many illustrations—but this is a necessary deceit to get them all on the same piece of paper. Neptune in reality isn’t just a little bit beyond Jupiter, it’s way beyond Jupiter—five times farther from Jupiter than Jupiter is from us, so far out that it receives only 3 percent as much sunlight as Jupiter.

Such are the distances, in fact, that it isn’t possible, in any practical terms, to draw the solar system to scale. Even if you added lots of fold-out pages to your textbooks or used a really long sheet of poster paper, you wouldn’t come close. On a diagram of the solar system to scale, with Earth reduced to about the diameter of a pea, Jupiter would be over a thousand feet away and Pluto would be a mile and a half distant (and about the size of a bacterium, so you wouldn’t be able to see it anyway). "
(A quote from "A short history of nearly everything" - which is a great book btw )

Then you realize how bigg our solar system actually is.... 
And that's just our tiny-winy solar system :O 

The time from earth to Pluto is about 4,5 light hours
The time from earth to the next star Proxima Cantauri is 4,22 light years away 
So that's about 8200 times further away :O

That would make the closest star more than 12000 miles (about half the circumference of the earth) further away if earth was scaled as the size of a pea 

I feel so tinyyy


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## skycloud86 (Jul 15, 2009)

That was taken just a couple of days after my fourth birthday, in the midst of great changes and great turmoil on our planet. One day we might be taking pictures of another planet inhabited by humans, or indeed other intelligent lifeforms that may be out there.


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## Ashvin (Aug 21, 2012)

I found a couple more awesome videos of the Pale Blue Dot with no music in them. Here they are:






and


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## Razare (Apr 21, 2009)

But if they faked the moon landing... who says voyager was ever launched?


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## Bugs (May 13, 2014)

tanstaafl28 said:


> Damn. I was 19 going on 20 then, and an E-3 in the Navy. Seems so damn long ago.


Damn that was a great time. Granted I was only 8 but I remember the photo since it was one of those things that got me into astronomy. Btw, ex-Navy (E-5) here. Happy Veteran's day man.


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## Out0fAmmo (Nov 30, 2010)

I saw this on the Space Engineers subreddit today, cross-posted from Star Citizen. If this doesn't get you excited in the possibilities of space exploration, nothing will:


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## tanstaafl28 (Sep 10, 2012)

Bugs said:


> Damn that was a great time. Granted I was only 8 but I remember the photo since it was one of those things that got me into astronomy. Btw, ex-Navy (E-5) here. Happy Veteran's day man.


Likewise Shipmate.


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