
Absolutely amazing new photos from NASA's New Horizons spacecraft are the deepest we have ever taken a picture in space.
The photos above may look like nothing more than bright bluish green smudges, but they are actually a record for the deepest we have ever snapped a photograph in space. They were taken by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, the same one that captured those incredible photos of Pluto back in 2015, and they represent objects of interest in the distant Kuiper Belt.
NASA took the photo using the New Horizons spacecraft’s Long Range Reconnaissance Imager last week. New Horizons has been heading deep into our solar system ever since passing Pluto, and it will study three objects: the two objects you see above, and a star group far beyond known as the Wishing Well.
The previous record for greatest distance to take a photo was the Voyager 1 spacecraft, which snapped an incredible shot of Earth from a distance of 3.75 billion miles. The “Pale Blue Dot” photo inspired famous astronomer Carl Sagan to wax poetic about human history and the universe itself.
“NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft recently turned its telescopic camera toward a field of stars, snapped an image – and made history,” reads the NASA statement. “The routine calibration frame of the “Wishing Well” galactic open star cluster, made by the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) on Dec. 5, was taken when New Horizons was 3.79 billion miles (6.12 billion kilometers, or 40.9 astronomical units) from Earth – making it, for a time, the farthest image ever made from Earth.
“New Horizons was even farther from home than NASA’s Voyager 1 when it captured the famous “Pale Blue Dot” image of Earth. That picture was part of a composite of 60 images looking back at the solar system, on Feb. 14, 1990, when Voyager was 3.75 billion miles (6.06 billion kilometers, or about 40.5 astronomical units [AU]) from Earth. Voyager 1’s cameras were turned off shortly after that portrait, leaving its distance record unchallenged for more than 27 years.”
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