“One of history’s most iconic photos” turned 25 yesterday.
On Feb. 14, 1990, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft took a family portrait of the solar system, capturing Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter, Venus and Earth — which showed up as a “pale blue dot” — in a single view.
The famous image “continues to inspire wonderment about the spot we call home,” Voyager project scientist Ed Stone, of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, said in a NASA statement.
The late astronomer Carl Sagan referenced and further immortalized the photo in the title of his 1994 book, “The Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space” (Random House). Sagan was part of the Voyager imaging team when the picture was taken.
Voyager 1 took the photo while located 40 astronomical units (AU) from Earth, NASA officials said. (One AU is the distance from Earth to the sun — about 93 million miles, or 150 million kilometers.)