ANTHONY RENDON

The late astronomer and teacher, Carl Sagan, requested that the Voyager 1 spacecraft, in its journey through the cosmos, pause at the edge of our solar system and take a photo of the Earth as seen from that perspective before traveling on. The scientists at NASA granted his request and, on February 14, 1990, the resulting image, transmitted from 4 billion miles away, shows our planet as it is in the universe: a pale blue dot, barely the size of the period at the end of this sentence.