In 1990, engineers were asked to point a multimillion-dollar camera almost directly at the Sun to photograph a subject that would not even fill a single pixel. This episode tells the story of the Pale Blue Dot, the iconic image of Earth captured by Voyager 1 from over 6 billion kilometers away, and why the idea championed by Carl Sagan and Carolyn Porco sat stalled for years until NASA administrator Richard Truly personally pushed it through in 1989.

The hosts walk through the analog vidicon tube camera that scanned a selenium-sulfur plate with an electron beam, the blue, green, and violet filter sequence designed by Porco and Candy Hansen, the onboard tape recorder that held the data for weeks while the Deep Space Network served Magellan and Galileo, and the lens-flare sunbeam that happened to frame Earth. The episode then explains why Ear ...