1977 was a momentous year for me. I was 9 years old and I had just experienced the thrill of our nation’s bicentennial celebration. Everything seemed to be fun and interesting because everything was new. Then, in May of 1977, my mind was completely blown away when Star Wars hit the movie screens. The story left an indelible mark on my mind and to this day I still wish that I could join the Jedi Order and learn the ways of the Force.

Perhaps a little less memorable was the global buildup to the launch of the Voyager 1 space probe. On the big movie screens we saw X-Wings and TIE fighters zooming about in duels that bore a curious resemblance to the black-and-white films of World War II dogfights that we had seen in PBS documentaries. Meanwhile, on the small screens of our televisions we saw images of our own spaceship that was being fitted with a Golden Record that would bear messages of greetings out into the universe. Would Luke Skywalker receive our missive and respond?

In September of 1977, the rocket carrying Voyager 1 blasted off while the entire world watched. The mission of Voyager 1 was “simple.” First, the probe would fly past Jupiter and send back photos and all sorts of scientific data. This happened in March of 1979 when I was 11 years old. The pictures were all over the news, and I am sure that I was not the only person to scrutinize every one of them in search of any hint of an Imperial Star Destroyer.

Then, in November of 1980, the probe flew past Saturn. Once again, the photos were astounding, and they were even more mesmerizing than the pictures of Jupiter because of those remarkable rings. We couldn’t get enough of the products of this amazing scientific achievement, and when the probe flew past Titan (Saturn’s largest moon), we were once again on the edges of our seats. Were there any signs of life out there?

Because of the laws of physics and the objectives of the Voyager 1 mission, the probe was then captured by Titan’s gravity and it was hurled on a trajectory that sent it out of the ecliptic plane. This refers to the roughly flat imaginary racetrack that the planets follow as they orbit the sun. Voyager 2 would not leave the ecliptic plane, but Voyager 1 took a major detour. There were no further planets in the path of Voyager 1. Instead, the probe headed out into deep space.

Ten years later, in 1990, I was 22 years old and finishing up my Bachelor’s Degree at UMass, Amherst. I was highly distracted with my future, so I missed out on the fact that another momentous event took place at NASA. Voyager 1 was 3.5 billion miles from home and over the course of the 13 years since it had left Earth things had changed. Budget cuts at NASA suggested that Voyager 1 would not get the same amount of attention as it once had enjoyed. So, Carl Sagan pressured for one last photo to be taken.

In Sagan’s own words: “The ship was speeding away from the sun at 40,000 miles per hour. But in early February of 1990 it was overtaken by an urgent message from Earth. Obediently, it turned its cameras back toward the now distant planets.” In one of the last photos the probe ever took, there is a “Pale Blue Dot” that is little more than a single pixel. That dot was the only visible trace of Earth.

This year we celebrate the 49th anniversary of the launch of Voyager 1. The probe is now 15 billion miles away and (astonishingly) its nuclear batteries are still working and faint signals are still coming home. In 1994, just two years before his death, Carl Sagan published a book called, “Pale Blue Dot” to somehow capture the significance of that image. I have this book in my personal library, and I like to pick it up and read it from time to time. This year I decided to take a photo of my own to serve as an homage to Sagan.

You have all heard my stories of my Thinking Chair; that one small spot on Earth that I visit as often as possible in my quest to deepen my understanding of the natural world. The Thinking Chair “launched” in 2018 and for the past 8 years it has served as an increasingly significant focal point of my life. Interestingly, it is also affected by the motions of Earth around the Sun. We are now in the beginning of that season we call autumn. The days are getting shorter, the nights are getting colder, and my days down in the meadow are numbered. The Thinking Chair begins to feel very far away.

So, with a sense of great longing, I stepped out onto my deck on one of our recent rainy weekends and “obediently” turned my camera toward the meadow. I snapped a simple photo. The eye might initially be drawn to the two maple trees that show the first signs of autumn colors, but in the bottom left corner you can see a “Pale White Dot.” Just a few pixels in size, this is all that can be seen of the Thinking Chair. Over the course of its 8-year mission, I have spent uncounted hours sitting, waiting, and watching in my Thinking Chair. I have seen wondrous things down there and I have shared many of them with you. But now it all seems out of reach and I am feeling a bit melancholy. Fortunately, spring will come soon enough and I can return to the meadow. Meanwhile, Voyager 1 speeds deeper and deeper into space, never to return.

Bill Danielson has been a professional writer and nature photographer for 29 years. He has worked for the National Park Service, the US Forest Service, the Nature Conservancy and the Massachusetts State Parks and he currently teaches high school biology and physics. For more information visit www.speakingofnature.com, Speaking of Nature on Facebook, or the Speaking of Nature Podcast.