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If you’re an astronomy buff, February 14 means a lot more than just Valentines Day. It also marks the fateful day (HT: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory), in 1990, when the Voyager I spaceprobe took a “family portrait” of all the planets of our solar system that it could see as one last parting gift before it shut down its camera and continued its journey towards “interstellar space”:

The diagram above shows the 60 frames that Voyager I took. The pictures aren’t high-resolution beauties (as a result of needing to use optical tricks to correct for the amazing brightness of the sun and the light it scatters, and smearing from the long exposure times needed to capture Neptune and Uranus), but it is still amazing to think that this is the only family portrait mosaic of the solar system ever taken. Closeups on the 6 prominently visible planets are below (left to right and top to bottom are Venus, Earth, Jupiter, and Saturn, Uranus, Neptune):

More details are at the NASA JPL page, but I will leave you all with this bit from Carl Sagan:

This was the image that inspired Carl Sagan, the the Voyager imaging team member who had suggested taking this portrait, to call our home planet "a pale blue dot."

As he wrote in a book by that name, "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. … There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world."

Happy 20 year anniversary to the grandest family portrait humanity has ever taken, and happy Valentine’s Day to all.

(Image credits – NASA JPL)

We previously discussed using the powerful Wolfram|Alpha tool to look up medical/biological information, but did you know it also works for astronomical information also?

The Wolfram|Alpha blog lists a couple of great tricks, including:

• the ability to identify the stars in the sky based on your location
• looking up information about a specific star’s distance, brightness, spectral class (astronomy nerds out there know the “Oh Be A Fine Girl Kiss Me!” classification system), mass, and even surface temperature!
• looking up information about the next lunar and solar eclipses, sunrises, and sunsets
• looking up general information about the planets in the solar system

What I find most impressive, however, is Wolfram|Alpha’s ability to generate graphical depictions of the information you’re looking for, whether it be understanding what you’ll see when you look up in the sky:

Visualizing the path of the sun for a particular day:

Or getting a sense of the 3-body-configuration of the sun, moon, and earth:

Chalk this up as yet another cool thing you can do with Wolfram|Alpha!

(Image credit: Wolfram|Alpha and Wolfram|Alpha blog)