That little dot is Earth

By NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE - This week marks the 20th anniversary of a photograph. It’s a very dramatic photo, even though, at first glance, it’s mostly dark and seems to show nothing at all.

But if you look closely, you can see a tiny speck of light. That speck is the Earth, seen from very, very, very far away.

Two decades ago, Candice Hansen-Koharcheck became the first person to ever see that speck, sitting in front of a computer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab in California. “I was all alone, actually, that afternoon, in my office,” she recalls…

Her office was dark. The window shades were drawn. She was searching through a database of images sent home by the Voyager 1 spacecraft, which at the time was nearly 4 billion miles away. “I knew the data was coming back,” she says, “and I wanted to see how it had turned out.”

Finally, she found it. ”It was just a little dot, about two pixels big, three pixels big,” she says. “So not very large.” But this was the Earth — seen as no human had ever seen it before.

What’s more, an accidental reflection off the spacecraft made it look as though the tiny speck was being lit up by a glowing beam of light. “You know, I still get chills down my back,” says Hansen-Koharcheck. “Because here was our planet, bathed in this ray of light, and it just looked incredibly special.”

And yet, if you weren’t searching for it, that special little speck would be almost invisible. The Apollo astronauts had taken photos that showed the Earth as a big blue marble, swirling with clouds and continents. But this picture showed the smallness of Earth in the vastness of space.

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