Carl Sagan on the Edge of the Gorge

On Stewart Avenue, perched right on the rim of the Fall Creek gorge, stands a strange and beautiful Egyptian revival building. For years it was the home of Carl Sagan, the astronomer who taught the world to look up. Sagan came to Cornell in nineteen sixty-eight and stayed until his death, serving as the David Duncan Professor of Astronomy and directing the university's Laboratory for Planetary Studies right here in Ithaca.

From this town he helped shape humanity's first steps into deep space. He worked on the Voyager missions and chaired the committee that created the Golden Record, a phonograph record of Earth's sounds and music bolted to two spacecraft now drifting between the stars. In nineteen eighty his television series Cosmos brought the universe into living rooms around the planet, and his idea of the Pale Blue Dot, our whole world reduced to a single speck of light, became one of the most quoted images in science.

Sagan died in December of nineteen ninety-six, at the age of sixty-two, and he was laid to rest here in Ithaca. His memory lives in the Sagan Planet Walk downtown, a scale model of the solar system, one part in five billion, that begins with the Sun on the Ithaca Commons and walks you all the way out to Pluto at the Sciencenter.