If boxes of chocolate aren’t your thing, maybe you ought to consider throwing a space-themed birthday party this weekend. That’s because Valentine’s Day marks the 25th birthday of one very special photo captured by the NASA Voyager 1 spacecraft: the “first-ever portrait of the solar system.” Per Space:
On Feb. 14, 1990, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft took a family portrait of the solar system, capturing Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter, Venus and Earth — which showed up as a “pale blue dot” — in a single view.
The famous image “continues to inspire wonderment about the spot we call home,” Voyager project scientist Ed Stone, of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, said in a NASA statement.
The late astronomer Carl Sagan referenced and further immortalized the photo in the title of his 1994 book, The Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (Random House). Sagan was part of the Voyager imaging team when the picture was taken…
Only three of the solar system’s then-recognized nine planets failed to find a spot in the picture: Mars was too dark; Mercury was too close to the sun, and Pluto was too dim.
According to NASA, the photo was taken from about 40 astronomical units from Earth, which is about 3,720,000,000 miles.