The Voyager Golden Record: the cover

Edition

Photograph GPN-2000-001978 of NASA’s Great Images in NASA collection (JPL number p24652b, dated 4 September 1977, “Creator/Photographer: NASA”, NASA Center: Jet Propulsion Laboratory; record read from its capture of 11 September 2011 by the Internet Archive, https://web.archive.org/web/20110911125940/http://grin.hq.nasa.gov/ABSTRACTS/GPN-2000-001978.html), as uploaded to Wikimedia Commons (2215 x 2215 px, SHA-256 89f8666e15f201cf4d428bc3e4d9bd11e064cedcac212a13f2124bc556055cff). For the poster the black background around the disc is made transparent: an ellipse fitted by eye to the rim of the disc (centre 1106, 1110; radii 1071 and 1065 px) keeps the disc, antialiased, and the image is cropped to it (2151 x 2139 px) and saved as WebP at quality 90. The part of the flare at the upper right that lies outside the rim is dropped with the background. The colours are those of the photograph. The cover bears no words, only engraved diagrams and binary numbers, so the poster has no text to transcribe. The notice below the image is not a period text: it was written for this poster, and every fact in it comes from two NASA pages, “The Golden Record Cover” (https://science.nasa.gov/mission/voyager/golden-record-cover/) and “Golden Record Overview” (https://science.nasa.gov/mission/voyager/voyager-golden-record-overview/), both retrieved on 27 September 2026, and from the NASA description of GPN-2000-001978.

Rights

In the United States, a photograph and a design of NASA (17 U.S.C. 105): the Great Images in NASA record credits the photograph to NASA (“Creator/Photographer: NASA”, NASA Center: Jet Propulsion Laboratory), and the Wikimedia Commons file page marks it PD-USGov-NASA. In France, the rule of the shorter term (article L. 123-12 of the Code de la propriété intellectuelle, after article 7(8) of the Berne Convention): for a work whose country of origin is outside the European Union and whose author is not a national of a member state, the protection lasts as long as in the country of origin, which grants none.

NASA Images and Media Usage Guidelines (https://www.nasa.gov/nasa-brand-center/images-and-media/, read on 27 September 2026): “NASA content [...] generally are not subject to copyright in the United States.” and “NASA should be acknowledged as the source of the material.”; material of third parties is “marked identified as copyright protected with the name of the copyright holder”, and this image is not. JPL Image Use Policy (https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/jpl-image-use-policy/, read from its capture of 13 May 2026 by the Internet Archive): “Unless otherwise noted, images and video on JPL public web sites (public sites ending with a jpl.nasa.gov address) may be used for any purpose without prior permission”, with the credit line “Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech.”, which the footer gives. JPL is operated for NASA by the California Institute of Technology, so the design team was not only federal employees; NASA and JPL publish the image without any third-party notice. The notice written for the poster is covered by the MIT license of this repository.