Voyager 1 takes the 'Pale Blue Dot' photo
On this day · 14 February 1990
From beyond Neptune, Voyager 1 turned around one last time and caught Earth as a single mote of light in a sunbeam.
On 14 February 1990, as Voyager 1 sped out of the solar system, NASA commanded the spacecraft to look back toward home. From about 3.7 billion miles (6 billion km) from the Sun, it captured Earth as a speck smaller than a single pixel, caught within a scattered ray of sunlight.
The image was the idea of astronomer Carl Sagan, who had pressed NASA for years to point the cameras back. Voyager snapped a series of frames — a first “family portrait” of the planets — then powered its cameras off for good.
Sagan later distilled the picture’s meaning in a passage that became famous.
“That’s here. That’s home. That’s us.”
Every person who ever lived, every empire and war, every triumph and cruelty, had unfolded on that tiny, fragile dot. More than three decades on, the Pale Blue Dot endures as one of the great arguments for humility — and for taking better care of the only world we have.
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