Telescope: Pale Blue Dot

amateur  astronomy series # 1

Peering in to past through Hubble Telescope

....watching time itself !!

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The Hubble Space Telescope (HST)  is a space telescope that was carried into orbit by a Space Shuttle in 1990 and remains in operation. A 2.4-meter (7.9 ft) aperture telescope in low Earth orbit, Hubble's four main instruments observe in the near ultraviolet, visible, and near infrared. The telescope is named after the astronomer Edwin Hubble.

(our only orbiting eye in space)
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It came up with  a picture of 10,000 galaxies. The farthest galaxies seen in the frame are almost 13 billion light-years away.
The universe itself is said to be roughly 13-14 billion years old. So, as you look at the picture you are actually peering in to a very very distant past - a time when time itself had just begun ticking and the observable Universe had just taken shape.

Carl Sagan - "We live in an obscure corner of a remote galaxy (Milky Way)."

Earth is situated many million light-years away from the center of the universe that envelops us.

The  Pale Blue Dot

Almost everyone has seen the image (photograph) known as the Blue Marble, which was one of the first images taken of  Earth from outer space. A lesser known picture is the Pale Blue Dot. Voyager 1, the man-made object that has ventured most into space, turned around to look back just as it was leaving the outer limits of the  Solar System ( Family Portrait series of images).

This was because  Carl Sagan, the sci-fi author of Contact, asked  NASA to photograph the planet from 3.7 billion miles away. The purpose of this exercise was to show mankind's humble place in the universe, and the resulting photograph had a small blue dot (Pale Blue Dot) basking in the rays of the sun. Technically it was half a dot as the planet was so small from so far away that it registered only half a pixel (0.12 pixel) on Voyager 1's sensor.

*Note: all pictures thankfully shared from various sources..