Perhaps our planet, this beautiful pale blue dot,
is part of a distant civilization’s constellation.
I’m comforted thinking that a child there
points at us in awe and thinks
there is a heaven, a better place.
“Pale Blue Dot” is the name given to a photograph of planet Earth taken in 1990 by the Voyager 1 space probe from a record distance of about 6 billion kilometers (3.7 billion miles) from Earth, as it was leaving the Solar System. Carl Sagan asked NASA to turn its camera around to take one last photograph of our planet.
Sagan’s 1994 book was titled, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
read an excerpt of what he said about it
Writing the Day 