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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.
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