Pale Blue Dot - By Carl Sagan
Please be aware that in all three of these links, there are a few very brief images or videos that younger students may not understand or may find objectionable. They are images and videos detailing the cruelties that exist in war. One in particular in clip 1 is a famous image captured during the Vietnam War of adolescents running for safety during a napalm attack (also present in clip 2). It is a historical image, and is appropriate for use with older students, but it's content is included with a cautionary teacher note: Please preview ALL videos you might use with your students and check for appropriateness for your situation. In clip 3 there is a replay of the moment an airplane struck the twin towers on 9/11.
This one pretty much speaks for itself. I had the honor of listening to Carl speak in person once, during a Planetary Society event following the impact of Shoemaker-Levey-9 into Jupiter. He was every bit the science star I belived him to be. He helped ignight my love of science with his Cosmos book and series. This audio clip from his book "Pale Blue Dot" is read by Carl himself, and is shown to my students every Earth Day.
I ask my students to see how many epic movie clips they recognize. The answer gets smaller every year!
Photo Credit: http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/view.php?id=52392
This excerpt from A Pale Blue Dot was inspired by an image taken, at Carl Sagan's suggestion, by Voyager 1 on February 14, 1990. As the spacecraft left our planetary neighborhood for the fringes of the solar system, engineers turned it around for one last look at its home planet. Voyager 1 was about 6.4 billion kilometers (4 billion miles) away, and approximately 32 degrees above the ecliptic plane, when it captured this portrait of our world. Caught in the center of scattered light rays (a result of taking the picture so close to the Sun), Earth appears as a tiny point of light, a crescent only 0.12 pixel in size. (from youtube)
NASA Explanation of Original Photo:
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. The spacecraft acquired a total of 60 frames for a mosaic of the solar system from a distance of more than 4 billion miles from Earth and about 32 degrees above the ecliptic. 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. Coincidentally, Earth lies right in the center of one of the scattered light rays resulting from taking the image so close to the sun. This blown-up image of the Earth was taken through three color filters -- violet, blue and green -- and recombined to produce the color image. The background features in the image are artifacts resulting from the magnification. (http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/view.php?id=52392)
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