What a beautiful minimalist painting. How well it captures (I think) the lonely traveller, spinning quietly 600 million years from now (and still then at the beginning of its trip). Like HAL 9000 said in
A Space Odyssey as Dave was unplugging it, "will I be dreaming?" The probe's silhouette looks alien, and yet familiar; maybe even a bit Christic.
I've also seen somewhere (where?) a painting of Voyager in the far future, all pitted and disarticulated by eons of radiation and micrometeoroids. But this one is serene. I find it very soothing. The anonymous poster, downloadable along with rather less inspired ones at
https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/downloads, also gets the 1980s look, still a little psychedelic. Pity it's only credited to "JPL/Caltech".
And wow, speaking of the Voyagers, did I go nuts when the V1 pictures of Jupiter landed in 1979. I had missed the Apollos but I didn't miss Pioneer 10/11 and the Voyagers. The near-total lack of information on the outer solar system had been so frustrating, just the dim fluffballs which P10/11 had shown us around Jupiter and Saturn, with their vague hints of pastel colors, were stuff to contemplate and fantasize about. So, the shock when V1 resolved them into Io and Europa in all their glory. Getting hold of those photos back then wasn't so easy, and I bought every magazine in sight in the hope that one of them would have a photo I hadn't seen. I sent complicated money orders around the world for boxes of slides - the 35 mm film ones, in their little cardboard jackets, for which you needed a projector - that would magically arrive from remote California, full of moons and rings and clouds, and would then treat my school, holiday camps and any venue that didn't say no, to a lecture on the prodigies of Jupiter. Most people agreed it was cool and weird beyond most things in your daily experience.
It didn't hurt that
Star Wars and the Space Shuttle were also in play at the time. But Jupiter and its bizarre collection of marbles, all different and utterly unexpected, suddenly made the universe more interesting and complex. It was a revelation. So godspeed, Voyagers, and thank you.
Interstellar Voyager
