Thirty years ago, on Feb. 14, 1990, our Voyager 1 spacecraft turned back toward its home for one last look. Almost 4 billion miles from the Sun, Voyager snapped the first-ever “family portrait” of our solar system.
In this family portrait, Earth is visible as a tiny blue dot. This image of Earth, a tiny point of light, is contained in a camera artifact that resembles a beam of sunlight.
The late Carl Sagan referred to this image of Earth in the title of his 1994 book, Pale Blue Dot. Sagan wrote: “That’s here. That’s 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.”
This year, we revisited the Pale Blue Dot image, using modern image-processing software and techniques that weren’t available in 1990. As we count down to Earth Day, we invite you to reflect on this new look at our home planet.