voyager

Michael Zhang

These Are the 116 Images NASA Picked to Share with Aliens (or Future Humans)

In 2012, 35 years after its launch in 1977, NASA's Voyager 1 space probe left the Solar System and became the first human-man object to enter interstellar space. On board is a Golden Record with sounds and images that show life on Earth. 116 images were selected for inclusion by a committee led by Carl Sagan.

Vox just published the 5-minute video above to share a rapid-fire slideshow of the photos we humans chose to send toward the farthest reaches of space (note: one photo shows nudity).

DL Cade

Amateur Astronomers Recreate Voyager 1 Time-Lapse of Jupiter 35 Years Later

In 1979, as Voyager 1 made its final approach towards Jupiter, it snapped a series of beautiful black-and-white images of the massive planet that, when converted into a time-lapse, showed the movement of Jupiter's cloud bands for the very first time.

It's iconic footage, astronomically speaking, which is why 7 Swedish amateur astronomers and astrophotographers set out to recreate it using their own ground-based telescopes.

Sam Cornwell

The Pale Blue Dot: A Portrait of Earth Shot From 3.7 Billion Miles Away

Seeing as the Voyager-1 spacecraft has been in the news recently, here's the story of a very special photograph that it took 23 years ago known as "The Pale Blue Dot".

In 1990, 13 years after Voyager-1 left Earth on its mission to visit two of the gas giants and their moons of our solar system, Jupiter and Saturn, one last command was sent to the spacecraft as suggested by Carl Sagan who was then part of the Voyager-1's imaging team. That instruction was to turn back around and take one last photo of our solar system before continuing on its epic journey away from the Sun and the planets.

Michael Zhang

Photographs Launched into Space on the Voyager Space Probes

If you had the task of choosing some photos that represented Earth and mankind to extraterrestrial life forms, which photos would you select? NASA had to do this back in 1977 when it launched the Voyager space probes, which are now the farthest human-made objects from Earth. A committee led by Carl Sagan eventually settled on 116 images:

[...] a collection of 116 pictures (one of which is for calibration) detailing but not limited to human life on earth and the planet itself. Many pictures are annotated with one or many indications of scales of time, size or mass. Some images also contain indications of chemical composition. All measures used on the pictures are first defined in the first few images using physical references.

Among the photos chosen was Ansel Adam's famous Snake River and Grand Tetons photograph.