Pale Blue Dot

The greatest selfie ever taken? From a Zoom-Out perspective, certainly – and the greatest distance too. You'd need a very long selfie-stick to beat this one.

Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of planet Earth taken on 14 February 1990 by the Voyager 1 space probe, from a record distance of about 6 billion kilometres (3.7 billion miles, 40.5 AU) – part of its "Family Portrait" series of images of the Solar System.

Earth's apparent size in the photograph is less than a single pixel: the planet appears as a tiny dot against the vastness of space, caught among bands of sunlight scattered by the camera's own optics.

Voyager 1 had already completed its primary mission and was leaving the Solar System when NASA commanded it to turn its camera around for one last photograph of home, at the request of astronomer and author Carl Sagan.

In case you missed it – let's zoom in:

Carl Sagan's Lecture

At a public lecture at Cornell University in 1994, Sagan presented the image and reflected on what it meant to see our entire world reduced to a single point of light. Everyone who has ever lived – every joy and every war, every empire and every ordinary life – played out on that one mote of dust. Seen from that distance, he argued, our conflicts and self-importance look smaller, and our responsibility to look after each other and this "only home we've ever known" looks larger.

"That's here. That's home. That's us." – Carl Sagan, speech at Cornell University, 13 October 1994

Sagan later titled his 1994 book Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space after the photograph.