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The telecommunication ability also decreased with range, limiting the variety of data modes that might be used by the imaging system. After taking the series of images, that included Pale Blue Dot, NASA mission managers commanded Voyager 1 to power its electronic cameras down, as the spacecraft was not going to fly near anything else of significance for the rest of its mission, while other instruments that were still collecting data needed power for the long journey to interstellar area.
The command sequence was then compiled and sent out to Voyager 1, with the images taken at 04:48 GMT on February 14, 1990. The information from the video camera was stored initially in an on-board tape recorder. Transmission to Earth was also postponed by the and objectives being given priority usage of the Deep Space Network.
3 of the frames received showed the Earth as a tiny point of light in void. Each frame had actually been taken utilizing a different color filter: blue, green and violet, with exposure times of 0. 72, 0. 48 and 0. 72 seconds respectively. The three frames were then recombined to produce the image that ended up being Pale Blue Dot.
12 of a pixel, according to NASA). The light bands throughout the photo are an artifact, the outcome of sunshine showing off parts of the electronic camera and its sunshade, due to the relative distance in between the Sun and the Earth. This Article Is More In-Depth was approximately 32 above the ecliptic.
The wide-angle image was inset with two narrow-angle pictures: Pale Blue Dot and a similar picture of Venus. The wide-angle photograph was taken with the darkest filter (a methane absorption band) and the fastest possible exposure (5 milliseconds), to prevent saturating the electronic camera's vidicon tube with spread sunshine. However, the outcome was a brilliant burned-out image with several reflections from the optics in the electronic camera and the Sun that appears far larger than the real dimension of the solar disk.
Pale blue color [edit] Earth looks like a blue dot in the photograph mainly because of Rayleigh scattering of sunshine in its atmosphere. In Earth's air, short-wavelength visible light such as blue light is scattered to a greater degree than longer wavelength light such as traffic signal, which is the reason that the sky appears blue from Earth.