This excerpt from A Pale Blue Dot was inspired by an image taken, at
Carl Sagan's suggestion, by Voyager 1 on February 14, 1990. As the
spacecraft left our planetary neighborhood for the fringes of the solar
system, engineers turned it around for one last look at its home planet.
Voyager 1 was about 6.4 billion kilometers (4 billion miles) away, and
approximately 32 degrees above the ecliptic plane, when it captured this
portrait of our world. Caught in the center of scattered light rays (a
result of taking the picture so close to the Sun), Earth appears as a
tiny point of light, a crescent only 0.12 pixel in size.
This made me tear up... sigh.
great stuff!
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