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Wikipedia:Featured picture candidates/Pale Blue Dot

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Original - Seen from 6 billion kilometres (3.7 billion miles), Earth appears as a tiny dot (the blueish-white speck approximately halfway down the brown band to the right). This narrow-angle color image of the Earth, dubbed ‘Pale Blue Dot’, is a part of the first ever ‘portrait’ of the solar system taken by Voyager 1. From Voyager's great distance Earth is a mere point of light, less than the size of a picture element even in the narrow-angle camera. Earth was a crescent only 0.12 pixel in size.The image "was taken through three color filters -- violet, blue and green -- and recombined to produce the color image". The image has been blown up to make Earth visible, and The background features in the image are artifacts resulting from the magnification. The bands of colour across the image are scattered rays from the sun. This is the most distant image of the Earth ever recorded.
Reason
This image is of the most distant image of the Earth ever recorded. A large part of its encyclopedic value is in illustrating just how small the Earth is in space - this image is taken from just outside the Solar System. It is essentially non-reproducible. While quality is much lower than would normally be accepted, WP:FPC makes exceptions for images that are "historical or otherwise unique images". The low resolution is a feature inherent in its creation, due to the imaging device used and distance - from a distance of 6 billion kilometres the Earth appears as a tiny speck, visible only at low resolution. The image itself is actually a blown up version of a much smaller image in which the earth is essentially invisible, and the graininess that appears is a function of that increase in size. It appears as NASA created and distributed it - no larger versions are available. It has very high encyclopedic value in illustrating Pale Blue Dot, and signficant encyclopedic value as iconic image of the Voyager Program. Finally, while this is subjective, I believe that the image has "wow", something that has resulted in it being widely recognised as iconic.
Articles this image appears in
Voyager program, Pale Blue Dot
Creator
NASA Visible Earth, Goddard Institute for Space Studies
  • Support as nominator --Mostlyharmless (talk) 05:46, 5 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • I really don't know how to feel. On one hand I have this sentimentalism that irradiates from the tiny speck that we turn out to be. On the other, after reading the article, I feel deceived. They say the band over the earth is an artifact produced by the sun light, I assume that the other two bands are artifacts too. They say that the earth was 0.12 of a pixel. I can see Carl Sagan taking Paint and painting blue a pixel that only had a tiny component of blue. Something like taking a (100,119,104) pixel in RGB and making it (149, 179, 158). This is a prank of Carl Sagan, but it works on me. I weak support it.  Franklin.vp  11:38, 5 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • I was aware of these details when I posted my comment. Actually it was that what made me think that way :). These are the kind of things that NASA do that are mostly useless but can make us drop a tear. After all, not every day you see such a close-up ;) of the earth. My support would be complete for a picture like the one Voyager took of Neptune.  Franklin.vp  23:55, 6 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • Response Okay dude, WTF. I know damn well that in the greater cosmic order, Earth is a dinky little P.O.S. planet. I'm a blatant misantrope too, so I have no reason to love earth. Thing is, despite the illustration of Earth in the galaxy, the image still isn't that aesthetic, and its EV isn't that great. Whatever though. You are just reinforcing my deep love for the always rational and intelligent human race. Nezzadar [SPEAK] 18:29, 10 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Promoted File:Pale Blue Dot.png --jjron (talk) 12:54, 12 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]