Carrying supplies and three new astronauts,
Soyuz TMA-9 spacecraft was visible on September 20, 2006,
from the Space Station over the background of the Earth
The sole idea of Apollo 8 was to orbit and take photographs of the Moon,
but when William Anders saw Earth rising over the Moon,
he snapped the most famous photo of the mission,
known simply as "Earthrise."
50 million miles away, the Deep Impact spacecraft took this picture,
years after it slammed a probe into comet Tempel 1.
Earth and Moon seen with the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE)
camera of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter
First image ever taken of Earth from the surface of a planet beyond the Moon.
It was taken by the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit one hour before sunrise
The Cassini spacecraft, out at Saturn, took this photograph of
the Earth in September 2006. The Earth is the tiny, bluish dot on
the right of the image, just inside the outermost, diffuse ring.
Notice how, in the close-up inset in the upper left-hand corner,
there's a little blur on the upper left hand corner of the Earth?
Say hello to the Moon, as seen from Saturn.
Here’s what Carl Sagan said about this image:
“… We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a
dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human
being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings,
thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and
forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and
peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every
inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar,
every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a
mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.”
From a 1996 commencement address, drawing on Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the
Human Future in Space (New York: Random House, 1994).