Carl Sagan was the David Duncan Professor of Astronomy and Space Sciences and Director of the Laboratory for Planetary Studies at Cornell University. He was a consultant and adviser to NASA since the 1950’s, briefed the Apollo astronauts before their flights to the Moon, and was an experimenter on the Mariner, Viking, Voyager, and Galileo expeditions to the planets…. (Excerpt from APOD) click the following link for the Picture

Astronomy Picture of the Day

Discover the cosmos!

December 26, 1996

Carl Sagan 1934-1996

Picture at this link: Credit and Copyright: 1994 by Michael Okoniewski

Discription, Explanation: Carl Sagan died last Friday at the age of 62. Sagan was the world’s most famous astronomer. Among his many activities as a scientist, he contributed to the discovery that the atmosphere of Venus is prohibitively hot and dense, and found evidence that Saturn‘s moon Titan contains oceans stocked with the building blocks of life. Sagan was an outspoken proponent of the search for extra-terrestrial life, including sending probes to other planets and listening with large radio telescopes for signals from intelligent aliens. Sagan‘s outstanding ability to explain allowed almost a billion people to better understand the cosmos in which they live.

Don’t miss a Stroll Through this moment in HistoryI know 1996 was a very unforgettable year for me!  >>>

Tomorrow’s picture: HET: The New Largest Optical Telescope

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Authors & editors: Robert Nemiroff (MTU) & Jerry Bonnell (USRA) NASA Technical Rep.: Jay Norris. Specific rights apply. A service of: LHEA at NASA/GSFC

 

At his website you’ll love the soft, ambient music!!

Carl Sagan

 

Excerpt from

Center For Inquiry:

Carl Sagan was the David Duncan Professor of Astronomy and Space Sciences and Director of the Laboratory for Planetary Studies at Cornell University. He was a consultant and adviser to NASA since the 1950’s, briefed the Apollo astronauts before their flights to the Moon, and was an experimenter on the Mariner, Viking, Voyager, and Galileo expeditions to the planets.

In addition to many other awards, Dr. Sagan was a recipient of the Public Welfare Medal, the highest award of the National Academy of Sciences, for “distinguished contributions in the application of science to the public welfare…Carl Sagan has been enormously successful in communicating the wonder and importance of science. His ability to capture the imagination of millions and to explain difficult concepts in understandable terms is a magnificent achievement.”

A Pulitzer Prize winner for the book The Dragons of Eden: Speculations of the Evolution of Human Intelligence, Dr. Sagan was the author of many bestsellers, including Demon-Haunted World and Cosmos, which became the bestselling science book ever published in English. He received twenty-two honorary degrees from American colleges and universities for his contributions to science, literature, education, and the preservation of the mmmmmmmenvironment, and many awards for his work on the long-term consequences of nuclear war and reversing the nuclear arms race.

In their posthumous award to Dr. Sagan of their highest honor, the National Science Foundation declared that his “research transformed planetary science… his gifts to mankind were infinite.”

“Encourage substantive debate on the evidence by knowledgeable proponents of all points of view.

Arguments from authority carry little weight (in science there are no “authorities”).

Spin more than one hypothesis – don’t simply run with the first idea that caught your fancy.

Try not to get overly attached to a hypothesis just because it’s yours.

Quantify, wherever possible.

If there is a chain of argument every link in the chain must work.

Occam’s razor – if there are two hypotheses that explain the data equally well choose the simpler.

Ask whether the hypothesis can, at least in principle, be falsified (shown to be false by some unambiguous test). In other words, it is testable? Can others duplicate the experiment and get the same result”?

Read more at the Carl Sagan portal.

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Full Playlist of Carl Sagan’s ‘Cosmos’ (approx 1 hour each video)

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Original caption: “Founding of the Planetary Society Carl Sagan, Bruce Murray and Louis Friedman, the founders of The Planetary Society at the time of signing the papers formally incorporating the organization. The fourth person is Harry Ashmore, an advisor, who greatly helped in the founding of the Society. Ashmore was a Pulitizer Prize winning journalist and leader in the Civil Rights movement in the 1960’s and 1970’s.”

“It had been well understood by the scientists and philosophers of classical antiquity that the Earth was a mere point in a vast, encompassing cosmos — but no one had ever seen it as such. Here was our first chance, and perhaps also our last for decades to come”. ~ Carl Sagan

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Ann Druyan

An author, lecturer, and television and motion picture writer/producer whose work is largely concerned with the effects of science and technology on our civilization. She was co-writer of the Emmy and Peabody Award winning television series COSMOS. Ms. Druyan served as Creative Director of the NASA Voyager Interstellar Record Project to design a complex message, including music and images, for possible alien civilizations. These golden phonograph records affixed to the Voyager 1and 2 spacecraft, the fastest moving vehicles ever created by the human species, are now beyond the outermost planets of the solar system on their way to interstellar space. They have a projected shelf life of one billion years.

Ms. Druyan is the author or co-author of several books, including A Famous Broken Heart, a novel, and Comet, which was on the New York Times best seller list for two months. Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, written with Carl Sagan, was another New York Times best seller. She is also a credited contributor to the best selling books Contact, Pale Blue Dot, The Demon-Haunted World and Billions & Billions by Carl Sagan. Her articles have appeared in theNew York Times Sunday Magazine, Parade,Discover, and The Washington Post.

She wrote and produced the PBS NOVA episode “Confessions of a Weaponeer” on the life of President Eisenhower’s Science Advisor, George Kistiakowsky of Harvard.

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Nick Sagan

Has been writing professionally since he was 22, crafting novels, screenplays, teleplays, comic books, animation episodes and computer games.

He has worked for a variety of studios and production companies, including Paramount, Warner Brothers, New Line, Universal, Disney, actor/producer Tom Cruise, and directors David Fincher and Martin Scorsese. Nick co-wrote the award-winning computer adventure game, Zork Nemesis: The Forbidden Lands. His film credits include adaptations of novels by Orson Scott Card, Ursula K. LeGuin, Pierre Ouellette and Charles Pellegrino. His television credits include two episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation and five episodes of Star Trek: Voyager, where he worked as a story editor

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Voyager Interstellar Message:

In the annals of exploration, the achievements of the two Voyager spacecraft are unprecedented. The piddling journeys of Columbus and Magellan spanned a few tens of thousands of miles on the watery surface of one small world. Voyagers 1 and 2 have traveled billions of miles through the ocean of space, exploring dozens of new worlds along the way and revolutionizing our knowledge of the solar system in which we live. And as a gift of the brilliant mission design, these robot ships are no longer bound by the Sun’s gravity. They have passed the outermost planets and are on their way to the cold, dark near-vacuum that constitutes interstellar space. Nothing can stop them. Their radio transmitters are unlikely to work beyond the year 2020. Thereafter, they will wander silently and forever in the realm of the stars.

Who knows who’s out there? Perhaps the rest of the Milky Way Galaxy is populated by desolate, wasteland worlds circling a hundred billion stars. Or maybe the Galaxy is rich in life forms and intelligence and technology much further beyond our reach than the Voyagers are beyond the reach of Columbus and Magellan. Someday – maybe millions of years in the future – one of these ghostly, derelict ships may be detected and captured by the representatives of some devastatingly advanced interstellar culture. They will wonder about the shipbuilders…. (Read more via the link at the heading)