Carl Sagan – Astronomy Now

Voyager 1’s famous look back at Earth – a ‘pale blue dot’ – 30 years later

13 February 2020 Astronomy Now

NASA releases a reprocessed version of the iconic “pale blue dot” portrait of Earth as imaged by the Voyager 1 probe in 1990.

Follow a live Proxima Centauri exoplanet hunt with the Pale Red Dot campaign

15 January 2016 Astronomy Now

Pale Red Dot is an international search for an Earth-like exoplanet around the closest star to us, Proxima Centauri. It will be one of the few outreach campaigns allowing the general public to witness the scientific process of data acquisition in modern observatories via blog posts and social media updates. The Pale Red Dot campaign will run from January to April 2016.

Alan Stern receives Carl Sagan Award

14 January 2016 Astronomy Now

Dr. Alan Stern, associate vice president of the Space Science and Engineering Division at Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) and the Principal Investigator of NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto, has been awarded the 2016 Carl Sagan Memorial Award by the American Astronautical Society (AAS).

The ghost of a dying star — the Southern Owl Nebula

5 August 2015 Astronomy Now

This extraordinary bubble, glowing like the ghost of a star in the haunting darkness of space, may appear supernatural and mysterious, but it is a familiar astronomical object: a planetary nebula, the remnants of a dying star. This is the best view of the little-known object ESO 378-1 yet obtained and was captured by ESO’s Very Large Telescope in northern Chile.

Citizen-funded CubeSat ready to go solar sailing

20 May 2015 Stephen Clark

A shoebox-sized satellite conceived and funded by members of the Planetary Society, an advocacy organization co-founded by Carl Sagan, is fastened to an Atlas 5 rocket for launch to test one of the late celebrity-astronomer’s futuristic concepts for exploring the cosmos.

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Institute for Pale Blue Dots renamed in honour of Carl Sagan

10 May 2015 Astronomy Now

Carl Sagan’s highly inspirational 1980 TV series “Cosmos: A Personal Voyage” launched many a career in astronomy. Now the Carl Sagan Institute: Pale Blue Dot and Beyond — a research institution devoted to the pursuit of Sagan’s challenge to explore other worlds, to learn if they, too, contain life — was unveiled at Cornell University on May 9th.