I Vividly Remember The Day........

[excelsior-1]

......back in 1977 when voyager 1 was launched


just announced on the news that the craft has now officially left our solar system, and is now flying through interstellar space

[pixie373]

Oh. I was 3. Remember Challenger though.

[jim360]

http://xkcd.com/1189/

[Svejk]

I think there were 2 of them launched at the same time,(unless I'm getting it mixed up)
I loved that photo from the first one as it left our solar system and they took a picture of earth. Looked like a grain of sand.

[excelsior-1]

you are correct the, svejk

voyager 1 & 2 launched in the same year

[boxtops]

Gosh - when I think of all the things which have happened to me since 1977, and there it is, beavering away all that time....

[Clanad]

Let's hope it doesn't return as V'ger as in Star Trek: The Movie...

[wolf63]

Clanad - that was a lousy film. Star Trek (live my beloved Stargate) is best served with lots of humour. The V'ger film was too serious

[Svejk]

Eek!
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/71/PaleBlueDot.jpg/530px-PaleBlueDot.jpg

[naomi24]

^^ Brilliant. Mind-boggling distances - that's only a hop by comparison!

[bibblebub]

I was at a meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society at which Carl Sagan showed the pictures of the Jovian moons including, for the first time, volcanic activity on Io. Since it was a last minute change to his planned talk, this was probably the first time these pictures had been seen outside of the JPL.

[Svejk]

^ ^ ^
Did he give that brilliant(imo) speech about the picture?

[Svejk]

I think he did the Christmas Lectures one year. I thought him quite hypnotic. Wouldn't be everyones cup of tea, I suppose.

[LazyGun]

@bibble - That must have been pretty interesting! I have read several of his books, and seen footage from his documentary series, Cosmos etc and always been impressed by his presentations.

It is an impressive feat though - A piece of engineering some 36 years ago, still going, still signalling after all that time and all that distance, setting new speed records as it goes. It also serves to demonstrate just how ill-equipped our comprehension is when it comes to envisioning very big distances etc.

@Wolf -With you on Stargate - great Sci-Fi series, probably my favourite :)

[bibblebub]

It was when pictures like this http://1.2.3.10/bmi/www.sciencephoto.com/image/326716/350wm/R3800028-Voyager_1_image_of_a_volcanic_plume_on_Io-SPL.jpg were first shown, giving proof of the first known active volcano off of the Earth.

As regards Cosmos, I found Sagan's nasally delivery to be a bit irritating but it was a lot better when he was speaking live.

[bibblebub]

p.s. I wasn't at the RAS meeting just as a spectator, on the 2nd of the 3 days of the conference I did give a 10 minute presentation on the research I was doing.

[BlueToffee]

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2013/12sep_voyager1/

[murraymints]

Gosh..I remember it well....wish I didn't.. lol...wonder what will become of it !

[jake-the-peg]

I've still got quite a lot of my old Astronomy books from when I was at University and before.

I think what's easy to forget is exactly how limited the state of our knowledge was before Pioneer and Voyager

At that time the 200" mount palomar was the best we had

This picture rather graphically illustrates how far we've come

http://home.comcast.net/~erniew/astro/images/satsketch/lyot_1943_comp.jpg

[heathfield]

And everything Voyager accomplished was done with a mere 64K RAM computer - equal to Clive Sinclair's ZX Spectrum (remember them?), and less than today's smart phones!