The Pale Blue Dot (#6)

Carl Sagan was a pretty cool guy and a hero of mine. Sagan was also an astronomer, astrophysicist, cosmologist and author and many of you would probably have seen one of his most famous docos, COSMOS. Space and the betterment of the human race was his thing and he did it very well.

The best introduction to Sagan in my humble opinion is a little clip called Pale Blue Dot. The first time I saw the below video I was pretty floored by it. It begins with an photograph (which the clip is named after) of a tiny speck in the vastness of space… that speck is the Earth as taken by Voyager 1 at a distance of 6.1 billion kilometers. Im not going to try and put words to what I felt and thought, as Carl Sagan has already done that a lot better than I could as he reads an excerpt from his book (funnily enough called, Pale Blue Dot).

Seriously… watch this clip.  PALE BLUE DOT – YouTube.

</gushing hero worship>

Now, the drawing. I was trying to come up with an iconic symbol to represent Sagan… In the end with lots of stuffing about I was running out of time so I used his head with that wonderful mop of silver hair he rocked later in life! 🙂

Here it is: This drawing was done on 25th January 2011. It took 20 minutes.