Posted on 07/07/2005 5:44:56 PM PDT by KevinDavis
It was Valentine's Day, 1990 when a sleeping eye awoke after nearly nine year's of inactivity, and for a few brief moments, from a distance of nearly four billion miles, took its last look at the cosmic neighborhood from whence it came. Voyager 1, now the most distant human made object from Earth, sent back an image now known as "the Pale Blue Dot."
Astronomer and exobiologist Carl Sagan eloquently reminded us that this small, inconsequential speck amidst the cosmic background is home to everyone, every idea, and every plant, animal or microbe that has ever existed on our planet. And so far, this small, pale blue dot is the only place in the universe that we are certain has life.
I was kneeling at a depth of 120 feet in McMurdo Sound, Antarctica awaiting the arrival of my buddy, a telepresent ROV, that was being driven from a console at NASA's Ames Research Center over 10,000 miles away. It had been lowered into the water via a dive hole that had been made through the eight feet of sea ice above us. As I watched the graceful robotic device dropping through the column of clear, dark water, I noticed that the somewhat distant dive hole appeared as a small, pale blue dot against the darker ice that surrounded it.
(Excerpt) Read more at space.com ...
That image looks strangely enhanced.
> That image looks strangely enhanced.
Original Caption Released with Image:
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. From Voyager's great distance Earth is a mere point of light, less than the size of a picture element even in the narrow-angle camera. Earth was a crescent only 0.12 pixel in size. Coincidentally, Earth lies right in the center of one of the scattered light rays resulting from taking the image so close to the sun. This blown-up image of the Earth was taken through three color filters -- violet, blue and green -- and recombined to produce the color image. The background features in the image are artifacts resulting from the magnification.
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