Phonograph Disk

This is a drawing of a phonograph record and the location of it's stylus. The lines that surround the disk is binary arithmetic, meant to show that the record should be played at the proper speed of 3.6 seconds per rotation. The line segments pointing radially outwards from the circle represents a 1, and the line segments that are tangent to the circle represents a 0.

The unit time of this binary arithmetic as the time period of a fundamental transition of a hydrogen atom. This time period is also referenced in the drawing of the hydrogen atom on the lower right hand corner of the record.

There are a listing of sounds that were placed electronically on both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, most of them being sounds from life on Earth such as the sound of crickets, frogs, dogs and natural occurances like volcanos, fire, and thunder.

Phonograph Disk Side View

This is a side view of the phonograph depicted in the picture above. The binary numbers underneath the picture is meant to show the time it takes to play one side, which is about one hour.

Fun fact, in July 2015, NASA uploaded all of the audio contents of the Golden Record on Soundcloud, a quick Google search will take you to it!

Pulsar Map

This star looking shape is a diagram that shows the location of our solar system in reference to 14 known pulsars. The dashed lines on the diagram is meant to define the frequency of the pulses.

Pulsars are highly magnetic neutron stars, which is sometime a byproduct of a star going supernova. Their core condenses into an extremely dense body. Pulsars radiate two beams of light opposite of each other, and it's rotational spin give the illusion on earth that the pulsar is flickering on and off.

Interesting fact, pulsars were first discovered in 1967 and both Voyager probes were launched in 1977, 10 years apart!

Image Instructions 1

This is meant as a guide of how to construct images from the recorded signals. The signal traces pictures as a series of vertical lines.

The binary numbers below the signal note signal 1, 2, and 3 to distinguish three distinct signals.

Image Instructions 2

This is how the lines are to be drawn vertically. The staggered "interlace" is needed to give the correct picture output.

Image Instructions 3

A drawing of an entire picture raster, supposed to have 512 vertical lines for a complete picture.

Image Instructions 4

A verification image. The first picture on the record is a circle and this is meant to verify to those that they were able to successfully generate the images.

Fun fact: There is a total of 115 images encoded on each of the Golden Records!

Hydrogen atom

A drawing of a Hydrogen atom in its two lowest states. The line connecting the two atoms with the number 1 is meant to be interpreted that the time it takes for one state to transition to the other is the unit of time. This measurement of time is used for playing the record as well as generating the images.