Nov. 9, 1939: The birth of Carl Sagan

Today in the history of astronomy, the great populizer of astronomy is born. | Published: November 9, 2026 As a member of the Voyager imaging team, Carl Sagan suggested the infamous "Pale Blue Dot" photo, taken on Feb. 14, 1991 by Voyager 1. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech Nobody did more to popularize astronomy than American astronomer Carl Sagan, who was born Nov. 9, 1939, in New York. The landmark 1980 television series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, which he cowrote and narrated, has been viewed by more than half a billion people. He also wrote popular science books, including The Dragons of Eden, Pale Blue Dot, and the novel Contact, which was turned into a motion picture. But Sagan was no slouch scientifically. He predicted that Venus’ temperature should be above the melting point of lead due to a runaway greenhouse effect. He also imagined that Jupiter’s moon Europa might have an underground ocean. As a member of the imaging team for NASA’s Voyager probes, Sagan hatched the idea for Voyager 1 to take the image that would become known as the Pale Blue Dot. In it, Earth is seen from a distance of 3.7 billion miles (6 billion kilometers). He later wrote, “Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives … on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” Michael E. Bakich is a contributing editor for Astronomy magazine. With degrees in astronomy and planetarium education, he has led many eclipse tours, published several books on observing, and logged thousands of hours at the eyepiece.