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Earth A collection of pictures of our home planet, taken from outer space.

In the last 50 years, automatic space probes have visited every planet in our solar system and have orbited six of them. At some point of their journey, some of them pointed their cameras back to where they came from and took distant pictures of the Earth. On September 5, 1977, Voyager 1 was sent on a journey that 40 years later would make it the piece of humanity further away from home than anything else. Two week after launch, on September 18, 1977, Voyager took a first look back and got this amazing picture of a crescent Earth orbited by a crescent Moon. Here is brief chronology of pictures of the Earth from outer space.

Earth and Moon from the orbit of Mercury 183 mil. km (114 mil. miles) from Earth Messenger, May 6, 2010 Source: NASA Earth Observatory

Earth and Venus from the surface of Mars 54.6 mil. km (33.9 mil. miles) from Earth Opportunity, February 2, 2012 Source: Earthspacecircle

Earth underneath the rings of Saturn 1.45 bil. km (898 mil. miles) from Earth Cassini, July 19, 2013 Source: NASA Earth Observatory

The Pale Blue Dot 6.05 bil. km (3.76 bil. miles) from Earth Voyager 1, February 14, 1990 Source: Wikipedia

This is what Earth looks like from Mercury, Mars and Saturn (above, from left to right). The last picture is the furthest image ever taken of the Earth: On February 14, 1990, before it left the solar system and before its cameras were turned off to preserve power, Voyager 1 took one last picture of our home planet from the unimaginable distance of 6,054,587,000 kilometers (3,762,146,000 miles). Renowned astronomer Carl Sagan coined the term Pale Blue Dot for the pictures. He wrote: 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. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, 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.

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