Alien View of Earth
This is a picture taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft when it was nearly 4 billion miles away from Earth. A reflection off the spacecraft caused beams of light to streak through the photograph, and, coincidentally, there is a pale blue dot in the rightmost beam of light. It's our little planet.
This picture was first seen by Candice Hansen-Koharcheck, an astronomer working at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab in California, in February 1990.
Carl Sagan, who had always wanted Voyager to take a picture of Earth from so great a distance, had this to say:
Look again at that dot. 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. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every 'superstar,' every 'supreme leader,' every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.