On Sept. 18, 1977, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft took a 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 more than 7 million miles away from Earth. It had launched about two weeks earlier on a mission to explore the outer planets.
Related: Voyager: 40 Photos from NASA’s Epic ‘Grand Tour’ Mission
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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 went into 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.”
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