Family Portrait (Voyager)
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The Family Portrait, or Portrait of the Planets is an image of the Solar System created by Voyager 1 on February 14, 1990; the last taken by the spacecraft before it began its mission into interstellar space. It is the source of the famous "Pale Blue Dot" image of the Earth. Astronomer Carl Sagan, who was part of the Voyager imaging team, campaigned for many years to have the pictures taken.
The image was shot from a distance of six billion kilometres (4 billion miles) and an angle of 32 degrees above the ecliptic plane. It comprises a mosaic of sixty separate photographs, spanning a length of several metres. Voyager 1 was chosen because flightpath had taken it out towards the Solar System's north pole, and thus, unlike its sister, Voyager 2, was in a position to view Jupiter free from the Sun's glare.
Seven celestial bodies are visible in the image. They are, from right to left: Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, the Sun, Venus, Earth and Jupiter. Mars and Mercury were too small to resolve at this scale.
It is not a natural image; many of the photographs were taken at varying exposures and through various filters to bring out as much detail as possible. The Sun was taken with the darkest filter and the shortest exposure to avoid damage to the craft's vidicon tube. The majority of the images are wide-angle, but the close-ups of the planets themselves (seen alongside) are narrow angle images.
