Pale Blue Dot

Zoom from Earth's surface to the edge of the observable universe. At Voyager 1's distance, Earth disappears — a pale blue dot suspended in a sunbeam. Press Start Journey and watch it happen.

Viewing width —

"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."

— Carl Sagan, Cornell University, 1994

February 14, 1990 · 6.4 Billion km from the Sun

The Day We Turned Around and Looked

Voyager 1 had been traveling for 12 years when Carl Sagan asked NASA to do something no one had done before: turn the spacecraft around and photograph the solar system from the outside.

Engineers warned that pointing the camera toward the Sun could damage the detector. It was a one-time opportunity — Voyager was leaving, and its power supply would soon be too weak for photography. Sagan persuaded NASA to try.

On Valentine's Day 1990, from a distance of 40 AU, Voyager 1 took 60 photographs over 3 hours. Together they formed a mosaic called the Family Portrait of the solar system. Earth appears in one frame — a 0.12-pixel blue smear caught inside a scattered band of sunlight from the camera lens.

That band of light is not in space. It is a camera artifact — a lens flare from the Sun's glare. Earth sits inside it by accident. And yet that accident became the most humbling photograph ever taken.

40 AU Distance from Sun
0.12 px Earth in original image
5.5 hrs Light travel time to Earth
60 Frames in the mosaic
The original 1990 Pale Blue Dot photograph taken by Voyager 1, showing Earth as a tiny blue speck within a bright ray of scattered sunlight

Original 1990 photograph by NASA/JPL/Caltech. Reprocessed 2020 by the Planetary Society. Public domain. Earth is the tiny speck within the bright scattered light band at center-right.

"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."
— Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, 1994