You are here ===================>>>>·

[captainsblog]

Not much to report from my own life today, a holiday with about 80 percent of my workday world taking the day off, but some fun and poignant stuff from various friends' pages:

digitalemur and I exchanged snow-sculpture stories. She led off with an awesome one at her family homestead pictured on her sister's LJ page, while I could only describe the one I saw on my former home's front lawn last Thursday after Long Island got its blizzard: a Pillsbury Doughboy sitting somewhere above where the septic tank used to be.

----

One of her other commenters looked interesting enough to check out, and THAT led to an incredibly groany listing of bad jokes; the poster's favorite among them was this:



What's long brown and sticky? - A stick!



....while I was more partial to this one:



What's green and fuzzy, and if it fell out of a tree could kill you?

A pool table!



There are dozens of even worse ones (and more than a few sure to o-fend, so no complaining to me, eh?).

----

Finally, just now, lisaofdoom posted a poster on her wall of the Big Blue Marble Earth as seen from the moon, which reminded me of one of the NPR stories I got to listen to on the way home at the end of last week. You can read it, or listen to the audio link of it, on the All Things Considered site, but these are the observations from it of our earth- seen from the Voyager I camera 20 years ago last week from way way wayer out in space- that I found the most touching. Literally, in the last case:



Two decades ago, Candice Hansen-Koharcheck became the first person to ever see that speck, sitting in front of a computer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab in California. "I was all alone, actually, that afternoon, in my office," she recalls.

Her office was dark. The window shades were drawn. She was searching through a database of images sent home by the Voyager 1 spacecraft, which at the time was nearly 4 billion miles away. "I knew the data was coming back," she says, "and I wanted to see how it had turned out."

Finally, she found it.

"It was just a little dot, about two pixels big, three pixels big," she says. "So not very large."

But this was the Earth — seen as no human had ever seen it before.

What's more, an accidental reflection off the spacecraft made it look as though the tiny speck was being lit up by a glowing beam of light. "You know, I still get chills down my back," says Hansen-Koharcheck. "Because here was our planet, bathed in this ray of light, and it just looked incredibly special."

* * *

The late astronomer Carl Sagan eloquently tried to express how he felt about this photo in his book Pale Blue Dot:

    Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every 'superstar,' every 'supreme leader,' every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

[Ray again: ] I got to meet Dr. Sagan a few times in my first year at Cornell, when he was still teaching Astronomy 101 to all comers, and his 1990 comment on this somewhat later view of the world, made a few years before his untimely death, is consistent with his view of all humanity, whatever planets it may now or someday occupy.

The piece ends with a comment by Edward Stone, who was and still is the chief scientist for the V'ger mission:

To get the full impact of this photo, Stone says, you really have to see it up on a wall, as part of large panorama that Voyager 1 took of the solar system's distant planets.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab used to have just such a display with the full mosaic of photos posted up in an auditorium, says Hansen-Koharcheck. "And to show the whole thing it covered, oh, I don't know, 12 or 14 feet," she says — of mostly empty black space, with just a few pinpricks of light showing the planets. One of them was labeled Earth.

"One of the guys that took care of that display told me one time that he was forever having to replace that picture," says Hansen-Koharcheck, "because people would come up to look at it and they would always touch the Earth."

Voyager 1 is now about three times farther away than it was 20 years ago, says Stone. The spacecraft still routinely phones home, although its cameras no longer take photos. But if it could send back another picture, the little dot that is Earth would look even fainter and even smaller.

For reasons I can't even articulate, I find immense comfort in that sense of smallness.