Pale Blue Dot is a kinetic typography video animated to astronomer Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot speech about the Voyager 1 mission. The Pale Blue Dot photograph that inspired the speech is a photo of Earth taken by the Voyager 1 space probe on February 14, 1990 from a record distance of about 3.7 billion miles. Voyager 1 was about to leave the Solar System as directed when NASA instructed it to turn around and take the photograph at the suggestion of Sagan. He coined the phrase “Pale Blue Dot” and wrote about the importance of the photograph in his book of the same name, and then later recorded it as a speech.
I love kinetic typography, and have always enjoyed title sequences like those by Saul Bass. This speech is important to me, but also many people, for its reminder that Earth is our only home, and if we do not protect it, we have no backup plan. Sagan’s speech is very inspiring and I thought it would be appropriate to visualize. I chose Caslon as the typeface because that was the one used for the Voyager’s Golden Records, which was a phonograph record containing sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth.