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Caleb Pennypacker has come through again. This time, one of the pumpkins looks a little like one of our concept stamps for the campaign.

Here's the genesis of the Sagan pumpkins from Caleb Pennypacker:

On Halloween afternoon of last year, I found myself sitting around doing nothing due to a particularly miserable cold. After wondering what I could do to make the evening more enjoyable, I settled on carving a pumpkin.  I hadn't done it in a few years and decided it was time to step it up a notch and try a relief carving.  After purchasing a couple of pumpkins at the last minute, I took them home and looked through my folder of "cool images" to create a stencil from.  In the folder, however, was a stencil someone had already made of Carl I had saved earlier.  I knew right away that I had to carve this into my pumpkin.

Carl had always been the vehicle for my great fascination of space and hope in the role of the human species in the universe. Since his death, I felt horrible that I had never met him to express my gratitude for all he did for me.  So as an artist, I felt that it would be most appropriate to create a piece of artwork as an homage to him.  I knew he would like it if he were around to see it.  It ended up being the best pumpkin I ever carved, beating my 2004 John Kerry pumpkin by a mile.

Sharing the Gift of Carl Sagan

Caleb has kindly provided the Sagan Appreciation Society with three stencils so you too can display your own Sagan-themed jack o'lantern. We have an elder Sagan, the Sagan image from Caleb's first pumpkin in 2008, and one inspired in part by that COSMOS scene in John Boswell's "A Glorious Dawn". The white areas are to be fully carved though. The black areas are untouched pumpkin. The orange areas are thinned pumpkin surface where only some light gets through. Right-click on image to save the stencil in it's full 723x723 form. Print it to take up a full sheet of paper and you're ready to carve.