Suspended in a sunbeam.

A Pale Blue Dot

In 1990, Voyager 1, having finished its primary mission, and well beyond the orbits of Neptune and Pluto and on its way out of the solar system, turned its camera back towards the sun and took a series of photos of the planets from over 4 billion miles away. Earth showed as a pale blue dot less than one pixel in size on Voyage's imaging sensor. Due to its being so close to the sun from such a distance, Earth happened to lie within one of the resulting scattered light rays on the image.

Carl Sagan wrote the following about the image...

Look again at that dot. 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.

This month is the 10th Anniversary of the passing of Carl Sagan.