Launched only three weeks earlier, Voyager 1 turned its camera back toward home from a distance of about 7.25 million miles, producing the first single image showing both Earth and its Moon. The photograph, though modest by later standards, hinted at the spacecraft's larger destiny: it would go on to photograph Jupiter and Saturn's systems in stunning detail before crossing into interstellar space in 2012.
The image was unglamorous by later Voyager standards—both bodies appear as small, grainy crescents against black space—but it marked a genuine first in the history of photography. No previous spacecraft had captured Earth and its Moon in a single composed frame, together and to scale, illustrating just how small and paired the two worlds appear from even a modest distance.
Voyager 1 had launched on September 5, 1977, atop a Titan IIIE rocket, on a mission designed to exploit a rare planetary alignment allowing gravity-assisted tours of the outer solar system. Its cameras would soon reveal active volcanoes on Jupiter's moon Io and the intricate braided rings of Saturn.
The spacecraft's most famous image, the 'Pale Blue Dot,' showing Earth as a single pixel from the edge of the solar system, came thirteen years later in 1990. But this earlier photograph, taken while Voyager was still practically in Earth's cosmic backyard, was the modest first step in a photographic legacy that continues as the probe transmits data from beyond the heliosphere today.