Voyager Sees Us

We looked at the Voyageurs yesterday.  Today we consider it was the 40th anniversary of Voyager 2's journey through our solar system in August. The coverage below is from theatlantic.com. "In August of 1977, the first of two identical robotic probes was launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, bound for our outermost planets and beyond. Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 have each traveled more than 10 billion miles in the past 40 years, sending back invaluable observations and images. They discovered two dozen new moons, discovered active volcanoes on Jupiter’s moon Io, took a famous “family portrait” of our solar system, and much more. Voyager 1 recently became the first spacecraft to leave the heliosphere and enter interstellar space. The Voyagers are also famous for being our most remote emissaries, carrying with them identical “golden records” with images and sounds from Earth. On this 40th anniversary of the first launch, a look back at the still-running Voyager mission follows." Our first picture from Lilycrest Gardens is obvious.  What is our second picture? I've copied it from the article - 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 pixels 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. In 1994, Carl Sagan said of this image: "That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every 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."