Camera
The picture was taken by Voyager 1 using the Voyager imaging science subsystem's narrow-angle camera. Narrow-angle cameras (1500 mm focal length), as opposed to wide-angle cameras, are equipped to photograph specific details in an area of interest. The Voyager imaging science subsystem (ISS) is a modified version of the slow scan vidicon camera designs that were used in the earlier Mariner flights. Unlike the other on-board instruments, operation of the camera is not autonomous, but is controlled by an imaging parameter table residing in one of the spacecraft computers – the Flight Data Subsystem (FDS). As the Voyager mission progressed, the objects being photographed were getting further away from the spacecraft and so were appearing fainter, even-though longer exposures were used. As the Voyager 1 spacecraft's distance from the Earth increased, the telecommunication capability decreased. The reduced telecommunication capability limited the number of data modes that can be used by the imaging system. In addition, the camera was slewed (a slight panning or tracking movement to compensate for the brief time exposure) in order to avoid smeared imaging. The picture was taken at 32° above the ecliptic and it was created using blue, green, and violet filters with exposure times for each filter being 0.72, 0.48 and 0.72 seconds respectively. In the photograph, the light band over Earth is an artifact: sunlight is scattering off parts of the camera and its sunshade.
After taking the Family Portrait images including the Pale Blue Dot, NASA mission managers commanded Voyager 1 to power its camera down as the spacecraft was not going to fly near anything else of significance in the near future, and other instruments that were still collecting data needed power for the long journey to interstellar space.
Read more about this topic: Pale Blue Dot
Famous quotes containing the word camera:
“If I were just curious, it would be very hard to say to someone, “I want to come to your house and have you talk to me and tell me the story of your life.” I mean people are going to say, “You’re crazy.” Plus they’re going to keep mighty guarded. But the camera is a kind of license. A lot of people, they want to be paid that much attention and that’s a reasonable kind of attention to be paid.”
—Diane Arbus (1923–1971)
“When van Gogh paints sunflowers, he reveals, or achieves, the vivid relation between himself, as man, and the sunflower, as sunflower, at that quick moment of time. His painting does not represent the sunflower itself. We shall never know what the sunflower itself is. And the camera will visualize the sunflower far more perfectly than van Gogh can.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.”
—Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)