Pale Blue Dot Redux

Back in the 1980s, Carl Sagan realized how important it would be for society to see what our home looks like from as far away as possible. For years he worked for years trying to convince NASA to use the Voyager 1 spacecraft to turn around before it left the solar system and take a photo of Earth.

It finally did, and the photo above is the result. The very small barely blue pixel is Earth as viewed from 6 billion kilometers away was the subject of a very moving speech/book by Carl Sagan, but we'll come back to that in a second.

In 2013 July something very unique also happened. A couple of forward thinking scientists on the Cassini space probe team had a very Sagan-like moment but with a twist. They realized that with the advent of technology it would be possible to broadcast to the world ahead of time that a certain space craft would be turning around and taking a photo of you. The Day the Earth Smiled was the result of that.

On July 19, 2013, this beautiful photograph of the same "pale blue dot" was taken while thousands of people looked up at the sky:

That tiny blue beautiful dot is us. Only Carl Sagan's thoughts can do justice to this pivotal image in human history. I can only imagine how much more he would have to say if he'd been here to witness it.

Click play below and listen.

"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." - Carl Sagan

Peace has been a difficult to acquire commodity for Earth, and violence seems to continue to endure almost anything thrown at it form across the globe. Perhaps this is what is needed; to step out of our scope of understanding and obliterate it with a perspective so powerful and staggering, to maybe one day eradicate such short sighted hatred. Maybe.

Space Images

Space photography gives us some of the most breathtaking and awe inspiring photos in history. I figured it would be a travesty if I didn't explore it on my own blog!

My Favorites

Space Station transit across Moon
Photo Credit: Thierry Legault (http://legault.perso.sfr.fr/)

The International Space Station doesn't get nearly enough attention. I mean in light of all the fancy space ships in sci fi movies ... not many seem to accept that we've already got one out in space! Maybe it's because how hard it is to relate to it. So that's why this picture of the ISS flying in front of the moon is incredible. For a moment it's very much within our realm of perception.

The Hubble Deep Field

This one is one of the earliest images that captured my imagination. Released in the mid 1990s, this very dense image, filled with close to 3000 galaxies doesn't look very interesting but here's the kicker; the image represents a very very..very small section of the sky. It's about the size of a grain of sand held at arm's length. Yep, there's is a lot of stuff out there.
#Scale


Nice try Hollywood...

This last piece will be about a set of images actually. All credit goes to NASA for this. They thought it'd be neat to see if they had any images that resembled the photography in the 2013 movie Gravity. What an awesome idea. You can check them out here but here are some of the most striking ones:

 

Look Up To The Sky

Inspired by a conversation with my wife, here's a post that's a bit more thoughtful than usual (not a coincidence!):

In the face of failures, disappointment, resentment, despair, and worry why is our most instinctive reaction to look up to the endless boundaries of the skies? I don’t know, but I ask why? 

From my two and a half meager decades on Earth I gather that people fear the unknown, but they are also able to find comfort in it. 

We've all had our moments, the ups and downs, unexpected loss and unexpected bliss and though we don’t always understand why things happen we collectively agree that the answers must be somewhere out there in the depths of never ending space.

As you can tell this post is more about the human emotion rather than science (yes…guys have emotions too! I mean a little prodding is usually required...)

The hues of the skies appear differently to all of us. Perhaps those who lay on a bed of prickly grass seek to find an answer or a message from those unreachable to us. We may believe that the depths of space are home to a species greater than ours, one which has all the answers. Or maybe we gaze at the skies to find our own answers, each one of us, looking through a different lens.

It is mind blowing to realize that the sky is the one and only thing the world truly shares, without partitions or borders. Just one boundless atmosphere.  

I leave you with a view from my apartment window; an example of how the sky is always there