The pale blue dot, thirty-six years on
Quarx1 min read
Voyager 1 turned around at six billion kilometres and took a photograph of nothing much. It is still the most quoted image in astronomy.
On 14 February 1990, at Carl Sagan's urging, Voyager 1 rotated its camera back toward the inner solar system and took sixty frames. In one of them Earth occupies less than a single pixel, caught in a band of scattered sunlight.
That's here. That's home. That's us.
The photograph has no scientific value; the mission team said so at the time. Its worth is entirely in the argument it makes, which is why it has outlived almost every image that was taken for data.