The Pale Blue Dot - Now with added pics

[Dr.Poisonfreak]

I'm gonna go join my local astronomical society just for this reason, this is nothing short of beautiful.

To gods birdie: BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA best thing i've seen all week

 

[Jemal]

I fail to see whats so insignificant about us. Think of this : something we made TOOK that photo. WE, humans, sent something out far enough to make that picture and then send it back to us. Whats to say that a hundred, 2 hundred, etc years from now we don't inhabit all of those OTHER little dots?
Today a camera, tommorow a colony, next week the universe.

 

[Motti]

I am an insignificant speck of carbon against the vastness of the universe, nothing at all in the grand scheme of things. Nothing I do will ever matter.
And it is wonderful.

 

[blankedboy]

Wow. I love the picture of the sombrero galaxy.

And I've know a lot of that. For everything we do, no matter how great we are, we're still a grain of sand (the earth, that is) in the beach of the universe.

No, we're a molecule of water in the oceans of all the planets put together.

 

[Sparrow]

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love...

My dog and Zach Braff have been in space?!

 

[Yokai]

Holy shit. Holy shit. Holy SHIT. Holy SHIT.
THE UNIVERSE IS REALLY BIG.
OP, sir, I congratulate you, you have just blown my mind. My frontal cortex is smoking.
One still can't really comprehend how damn huge everything is though.

I remember seeing a documentary on astronomy once where they had the relative scale of the earth to Jupiter, then Jupiter to the Sun, then the Sun to Sirius, then Sirius to Betelgeuse, all the way up to the largest known star in the universe, which is so insanely colossal, the Sun is smaller than the Earth on a relative scale. Our entire solar system would easily fit inside this star with a few million miles to spare on each side.
Then the image zoomed out, slowly, until the entire galaxy was visible. Until that incomprehensibly colossal star was lost, smaller than a single pixel, among hundreds of millions of others. That was humbling. Seeing that Hubble Deep Field image just made it more so.

On a slightly humorous side note, when I was a kid of about seven or eight, I saw that photo of the Pillars of Creation and got it into my head that they were giant rock formations on Pluto. Of course, that was before I knew the average nebula is home to hundreds, if not thousands of stars. Ah, the innocence of youth.

 

[Yokai]

Looking at Earth so far away, I wonder what it would be like if our planet had a debris ring like Saturn. How would we on Earth see the ring as well?. Like a rainbow?. Ah well.

We'd probably see it as a gigantic arc in the sky. It would be angled depending on your latitude: At the equator it would cross the sky's zenith; at the poles it would have disappeared over the horizon. And it would be damned impressive. We should go shoot a few thousand nukes into the moon so it explodes into bits and we get a pretty ring around the Earth.

 

[Eleuthera]

Now look at that pale blue dot again and keep in mind that's from a distance of "only" 5.5 lighthours, or 0.0006 lightyears. That's a close-up shot.

 

[Dragonearl]

Looking at Earth so far away, I wonder what it would be like if our planet had a debris ring like Saturn. How would we on Earth see the ring as well?. Like a rainbow?. Ah well.

We'd probably see it as a gigantic arc in the sky. It would be angled depending on your latitude: At the equator it would cross the sky's zenith; at the poles it would have disappeared over the horizon. And it would be damned impressive. We should go shoot a few thousand nukes into the moon so it explodes into bits and we get a pretty ring around the Earth.

That would look super awesome!. Except our poor moon will be no more and the tide will come in forever!

Holy shit. Holy shit. Holy SHIT. Holy SHIT.
THE UNIVERSE IS REALLY BIG.
OP, sir, I congratulate you, you have just blown my mind. My frontal cortex is smoking.
One still can't really comprehend how damn huge everything is though.

Lol, I can't tell if you are been sarcastic or sincere here. You have blown my mind away!

It's still somewhat of an unnerving thought that we just might not be alone. If there is intelligent life out there are they watching us with their version of a SETI program?. Are they posting pictures of the Milky way on their imageboards laughing and wondering about the blue planet?. Good lord, what if they have the same views as us?. i.e- turn everything into a mining colony?.

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love...

My dog and Zach Braff have been in space?!

If they are both dead and depending on what you believe then yes, they could be *in spirit* floating in space. If they are both alive then no, they are very much on that dot called Earth.

 

[CargoHold]

I'm going to tape this picture to my hand and look at it whenever I get annoyed at someone talking in one of my lectures.

 

[Kaboose the Moose]

those are some sweet clouds.

and its not the universe flipping us off, its flipping someone else off

Ah!. I think we are in the way though...

wrong angle, its aimed up slightly and to the right

It could be giving everyone in the north the finger. Who knows with the Cosmos?.

 

[Crayzor]

Really shows how self important we are, doesn't it. As if that one pathetic dot has any meaning or significance at all to anything.

 

[McHanhan]

What we should do is send out some remote probes like Voyager again but this time take high resolution images of our system and beam them to back to earth.

I saw a video quite recently by NASA who had attached a camera on one of the shuttles external booster fuel tanks and filmed a clip from launch to separation. It was quite impressive to watch the transition from space, to shuttle separation, to spiraling images as the tanks are ejected from the shuttle support and come plummeting back to earth and splash into the ocean.

Science is cool!

 

[manedwolf86]

Story of the Year is awesome! lol

(Pale blue dot is the name of one of their songs)

 

[Nick Bounty]

Those are some really humbling pictures. Just think that any one of those galaxies could be harboring life. Out there is probably our second home as well, if we chose to venture as far as that.

 

[McHanhan]

It's been a while but I recently took an interest in Astronomy thank to several documentaries I watched on the Discovery channel and it rekindled my interest in space.

I also had this picture which I think was taken from the ISS of a storm system on earth.

.

I wish I was an astronaut now but physics keeps kicking the crap out of my brain cells.