The Pale Blue Dot: Now New and Improved – Universe Today

Thirty years have now passed since the Voyager 1 spacecraftsnapped one of the most iconic and memorable pictures in spaceflight history. Knownas the Pale Blue Dot, the heart-rending view shows planet Earth as a single,bright blue pixel in the vastness of space, as seen from the outer reaches ofthe solar system.

Now, NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory have provided anew and improved version, using state of the art image-processing software andtechniques to reprocess the thirty-year-old image. JPL software engineer andimage processor Kevin Gill, whose images we feature often on Universe Today,led the effort.

Im very happy with how it came out and proud to be able toshare it, Gill said. I was incredibly honored to get to work on thesehistoric images.

The original image was obtained on Feb. 14, 1990. Rays ofsunlight scattered within the camera optics stretch across the scene, and oneray dramatically intersects with Earth, making it appear as a mote of dust,as astronomer Carl Sagan phrased it. Sagan was a member of the Voyager imagingteam at the time and had the idea for pointing the spacecraft back to look backtoward home for a final time. Voyager 1s camera snapped a series of 60 imagesthat were used to create the first family portrait of our solar system.

Making the image even more poignant is that it was taken justminutes before Voyager 1s cameras were intentionally powered down to conservepower. NASA also knew that both Voyager 1 and 2 would not make close flybys ofany other objects during their remaining lifetimes. Shutting down instrumentsand other systems on the two Voyager spacecraft has been a gradual and ongoingprocess that has helped enable their longevity.

For the newly reprocessed image, Gill said he consulted withplanetary scientist Candy Hansen and engineer William Kosmann, who both helped processthe original image. Gill processed the images from the raw data rather thanstarting with the already published one.

I dont know how they processed the original images, Gilltold Universe Today, but I used a pipeline that includes custom software, USGSISIS3, Photoshop, and Lightroom. I also handled the color differently than theoriginal. The mission planners took the photo in green, blue, and violet lightso its false color, but I applied a white balancing on the main sunbeam andretained a lot of the ambient light which made smoothing easier.

He added that preventing graininess and allowing largeupscaling were goals for the reprocessing.

At the time the original photo was taken, Voyager 1 wasspeeding out of the solar system beyond Neptune and about 3.7 billion miles(6 billion kilometers) from the Sun.

Thats here. Thats home. Thats us, Sagan wrote in his book, Pale Blue Dot. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world.

Read JPLs press release for more information on the new image. See this NASA page for more information about the family portrait of the Solar System.

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The Pale Blue Dot: Now New and Improved - Universe Today