NASA’s Cassini spacecraft may have done it, but it certainly wasn’t the first space mission to image Earth from deep space. So, let Discovery News’ space historian Amy Shira Teitel take you on a cosmic tour through the history of the “Pale Blue Dot" — a tiny pixel we call home. Browse the entire gallery
“From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Consider again that dot. 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. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, 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.” — Carl Sagan on Voyager 1’s famous “Pale Blue Dot,“ Cosmos
I’ve spent so much time trying to come up with the perfect Earth, but nothing works, nothing works. I’ve decided against skipping it and to just make SOMETHING.
“Look again at that dot. 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. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, 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.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”
- Carl Sagan
Thirty years ago today the first episode of Sailor Moon was aired, so I thought I’d celebrate it with a redraw of a screenshot from the 90s anime. Mentioning Carl Sagan on an image of Serenity admiring the Earth seemed poetic to me and suited to times like these.
Today is the feast day of Saint Valentine who was one of two, possibly three men named Valentine who are said to have been martyred on this day, but most accounts seem to agree that he was a bishop. He may have died in north Africa. He may have been martyred in Rome for marrying Christian couples. Or perhaps he was a bishop in Umbria who restored the sight of a blind girl and was later arrested and beheaded. These are just the ones who are associated with February 14th. There are at least eleven others. So we don’t really know who he was. Nor do we know how he became to be associated with love. He is also patron saint of epileptics, plague (presumably he’s against it) and bee keepers.
The first written record we have of Valentine being associated with love is in a poem by Chaucer from around 1375. In it, he suggests that February 14th is the day that birds choose their mates (and humans too). He seems to be talking about an already established tradition, but his poem was written in celebration the first anniversary of the King’s engagement to Anne of Bohemia, so perhaps it’s just something he made up.
As we mentioned yesterday, Alban Butler, is his ‘Lives of the Saints’ was of the opinion that Valentine’s Day was a Christian replacement for the Roman festival of Lupercalia. He told us that Roman women used to put their names into a lottery to be drawn by the men. There is no historical evidence for this, but we know that in seventeenth century England, they did something similar. But there were two draws, one where women drew out men’s names and one where men drew out women’s names. So everyone had two Valentines. We also know that married people were not exempt from the draw. In 1667, Samuel Pepys tells us about someone called Will Mercer being his wife’s Valentine, that she had drawn his own name and that he in turn had been drawn as Valentine of 'Mrs Pierce’s little girl’. As someone’s Valentine, you might draw a picture for them, compose a little verse or give a gift. So it wasn’t necessarily anything to do with romance. It was just a bit of a game where everyone got a present.
By the eighteenth century, people had started to believe that the first unattached person they saw on Valentine’s day was destined to be their wife or husband. So, someone who was expecting a visit from their favoured person might stay in bed and hide under the blankets until they arrived, just to make sure. We also came across a couple of things you might do to make sure you dreamed of your future spouse. You could pin five bay leaves to your pillow, one at each corner and one in the middle. Or you could boil an egg, take out the yolk, fill it with salt and then eat it whole, shell and all. After that you mustn’t speak to anyone or drink anything before bed.
Towards the end of the century, a sort of early Valentine card began to be produced by printers. They were known as 'mechanical valentines’. Things rather snowballed from there, with mass produced cards overtaking hand written notes in the nineteenth century. The one pictured above is from a collection printed in 1876. You can see a couple of Chaucer’s love birds in the top right hand corner. The baby with the arrows is, of course, Cupid. Cupid is the Roman god of desire and erotic love and he didn’t always look like this. The wings and arrows are de rigour but he used to be a lot older. He has two sorts of arrows, those made of gold which make a person fall in love and those tipped with lead which make you want to run away. He had a lot of fun deploying both in the same situation.
He generally features as a minor character in Roman myths, but the story of Cupid and Psyche is worth a mention. Psyche was a human princess who was so beautiful that the goddess Venus was jealous of her. She deployed Cupid to generally ruin her life, but Cupid accidentally scratched himself with an arrow and fell in love with her. He took her to his palace but only visited her in the night. She wasn’t allowed to look at him, which led her to believe he was a hideous monster. The story is from 'The Golden Ass’ the only complete novel in Latin that we have. It probably dates from the second century. In the tale of Cupid and Psyche, you can see the roots of both Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast. There are also quests involving a talking tower, a journey to the underworld and a kindly ant. All are undertaken by Psyche, and all whilst she is pregnant with Cupid’s child. So, something for everyone.
We also have a bonus fact for you. Today is the anniversary of the 'Pale Blue Dot’ photograph being taken. It is a photograph of the Earth that was taken from 3.7 billion miles away by the Voyager 1 space probe in 1990. We could tell you about it, but we couldn’t put it more eloquently than Carl Sagan does here. Happy Pale Blue Dot Day.
NASA is now bringing us a daily reminder of that message, thanks to the EPIC camera (a very appropriately named camera, in my opinion) on board NOAA’s DSCOVR satellite. You can see some of its handiwork in the image sequence above.
DSCOVR’s official space job is to observe weather on and around the sun, to extend its mechanical finger into the solar wind and measure how strongly that stream of charged particles is gusting toward Earth. It does this job from a special spot in space called the L1 Lagrange point. If you were to draw a line between us and the sun, DSCOVR would be sitting along it, like so (not to scale):
That’s a convenient place to put a spacecraft, especially one whose job it is to stare at the sun. See, DSCOVR is nestled inside a pocket where it’s tugged equally by the Earth’s and Sun’s gravity, like a stalemate in an orbital game of tug-o-war. Gravity does all the work, and the spacecraft doesn’t need to maneuver much to stay in position. There’s a few of these gravity-neutral Lagrange points out there, as you can tell in the image above, and we’ve got spacecraft residing at all of them.
As a side effect of its sun-staring mission, DSCOVR’s backside happens to be looking back at Earth full-time. In a way, I think that makes it a different sort of moon.
NASA doesn’t like to let any opportunity go un-scienced, of course, so they decided to slap a camera on DSCOVR’s rear, the one named EPIC, and use their stable perch to keep a regular eye on us. Good lookin’ out, NASA.
A little change in perspective can do a planet good. In 1990, from a vantage point beyond Pluto, Voyager 1 turned its cameras back toward home to take one last look, giving us the image that inspired Carl Sagan’s ode to ol’ Dotty Blue:
This was not an easy shot to take. Voyager’s camera wasn’t the fancy digital type like most of us have in our phones. It was essentially an old-fashioned black and white tube TV in reverse, relying on colored filters held in front of the camera to highlight different wavelengths of light. Voyager stored its image data on magnetic tape, and each of the shots took more than five hours to reach Earth. Sagan and NASA’s planetary science team had to practically move the heavens (since they were unable to move the Earth) in order to take that picture.
Now consider the effect this picture has had. That’s home. That’s us. Even if you weren’t born in 1990, everyone and everything that made you is in and on that hazy blue speck. I hope you never lose sight of how amazing it is to view our planet from this perspective.
Luckily, you can get a reminder every day. The DSCOVR satellite is now sending roughly a picture an hour back to Earth, 24/7/365. That’s a near real-time view of our home. Go take a look. It’s pretty epic.
Look again at that dot. 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. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, 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.
