The Earth and the Moon

@NASAhistory just posted to twitter that this pictures was taken 33 years ago today:

I love pictures like this, the Earth and the Moon in one frame.  This image was taken by Voyager 1, the first to look back from such a distance (7,250,000 miles away), and the right equipment, that the Earth and Moon could be seen together as a pair. There’s more information about the photo here.

A more recent photo was taken by the MESSENGER spacecraft en route to orbit Mercury:

This photo was taken from about the same distance from the Earth as the orbit of Mercury and was just recently released. Many people have remarked about its resemblance to the Pale Blue Dot photograph (also from Voyager 1).

Look again at that dot. 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. –Carl Sagan (from his book Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space)

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *