On Sept. 18, 1977, NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft took its first photo of Earth and the moon. It was the first time both the Earth and the moon were captured in a single frame.
At the time, Voyager 1 was 7.25 million miles (11.7 million kilometers) away from Earth. It launched about two weeks earlier on a mission to explore the outer planets.
Voyager 1 passed through the asteroid belt and visited Jupiter and Saturn. Then it took a sharp turn and started heading straight out of the plane of the solar system.
Before Voyager 1 started heading toward interstellar space, Carl Sagan convinced NASA to turn its cameras around one last time to take a family portrait of all the planets in the solar system. This family portrait shows Earth as a tiny speck in a ray of sunshine. It is now famously known as the "Pale Blue Dot."
Why it mattered
This view of the Earth and moon together in one frame may seem grainy and unimpressive, but in 1977, the Voyager 1 photo was our glimpse of humanity's place in the universe.
By 1977, NASA's Apollo moon missions were over and this photo captured in one view the only places humans have lived, worked or explored in the history of our species. It was a preview of sorts for another iconic photo by Voyager 1, the Pale Blue Dot. But we would have to wait until 1990 for that epic view, which showed Earth as seen from Saturn — nearly 4 billion miles (6 billion km) away — as little more than a blue dot in a vast cosmos.
Voyager 1 took this photo 13 days after its launch on Sept. 5, 1977, but NASA did have to massage the final image to make the Earth and moon shine together.
"Because the Earth is many times brighter than the Moon, the Moon was artificially brightened by a factor of three relative to the Earth by computer enhancement so that both bodies would show clearly in the print," NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which manages the still active Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 missions, explained in a retrospective.
Today, Voyager 1 is in interstellar space, and is the farthest object built by human hands from Earth. As of Sept. 18, 2026, Voyager 1 was about 15.98 billion miles (25.72 billion km) from Earth, according to NASA. On Nov. 18, the spacecraft will make history as the first probe to reach a distance of one light-day from Earth. A light-day, the distance light travels in 24 hours, is16.094 billion miles (25.902 billion kilometers) from Earth.
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