It has been 25 years since NASA's Voyager mission snapped the first-ever images of our planet from outer space.
In February of 1990 the spacecraft took a number of breathtaking images from its position just beyond Neptune, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory reported.
The "family portrait" captures Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter, Earth and Venus . Mars did not make it into the photo because it was hidden by shadows, and Mercury was too close to the sun. The image is referred to in the title of Carl Sagan's 1994 book "Pale Blue Dot."
"Twenty-five years ago, Voyager 1 looked back toward Earth and saw a 'pale blue dot,' an image that continues to inspire wonderment about the spot we call home," said Ed Stone, project scientist for the Voyager mission, based at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.
These were some of the last images taken by Voyager 1, soon after missions specialists turned off the cameras and repurposed the computer responsible for controlling it; Voyager 1 is still operating today.
When the images were taken when the spacecraft was 40 astronomical units from the sun (one astronomical unit is 93 million miles). It has now reached a distance of 130 astronomical units and is the farthest man-made object from Earth. If Voyager 1 were to photograph Earth today it would appear to be about 10 times dimmer than it did in the 1990 images.
"That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. ... There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world," Sagan wrote in his "Pale Blue Dot" book, JPL reported.
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