This is my photograph of Melbourne. It's not the home of everyone I've ever known and loved. But many of them.

28 years ago on Valentine's Day, Carl Sagan had NASA point the camera of Voyager 1 towards the Earth for a selfie.

Before that time, NASA had refused Sagan's requests. The spacecraft, they said, was still too close to the center of the solar system and the sunlight could have damaged the camera. When they finally agreed to take a shot, Voyager had been floating away from the sun for well over a decade. 

The photograph showed the Earth as a pale blue dot floating in space.

"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us," Sagan famously remarked on the image. "On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives."

If I lived in the Kuiper belt I would like to recreate the pale blue dot photograph. 

But I live in Melbourne, so this is my photograph of Melbourne. It's not the home of everyone I've ever known and loved. But many of them.

Almost every astronaut, when first looking at the Earth first-hand from orbit, reports a sense of awe and transcendence at seeing their home planet: "a tiny, fragile ball of life, hanging in the void, shielded and nourished by a paper-thin atmosphere". They are forever transformed by their flight. They gain a sense of unity with nature and connection with their fellow humans.

The thin bubble of air that envelops the Earth is invisible and I have no reason to think about it. There's some ducks and swans milling around, but I feel little connection with nature in the midst of this city. Sitting on the banks of the Yarra with my backpack pushed into the mud as a makeshift tripod—I'm no astronaut. There's little sense that these blinking man-made anthills are in any way fragile—even though many of people I know and love here are.

It's difficult to imagine Melbourne, my home, as just a tiny corner of that "mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam". But it also isn't difficult at all.

Photography and text by @quoll

NIKON D800 f/3.5 1s 105mm

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• Pale Blue Dot (Wikipedia)
• Overview effect (Wikipedia)

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Up for CC

I'd like to try an experiment. I'd love to see something like this on other posts, so I'm trying it here for the first time, and will keep adding it to the end of my photography posts in the hope of it catching on:

If the one-week payout for this post reaches $10 USD, I will release the original photo (unedited) with a Creative Commons license, and upload it to Wikimedia Commons (Wikipedia's image library) to allow its free use by anyone. I will leave a comment with the link if successful.

Maybe someone could suggest a catchy name for this concept? Also write a suggestion below if you have an idea for a better way to encourage Steemarians to release their photos into the Creative Commons.

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I'm still new on steemit, so thank you for following or resteeming, and I appreciate your comments on the photography or overly long caption.

Thanks also to the friendly community at @thewritersblock for help with copyediting.