Here’s a new photo that shows Earth and the Moon from a whopping 71 million miles away. It was captured by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx, which is currently on a mission to obtain a sample from a near-Earth asteroid and return it to Earth.



The photo was captured on December 19th, 2018, using the spacecraft’s NavCam 1 camera. Earth and the moon can be seen on the bottom-left side of the photo. The much larger white object in the upper-right side is asteroid Bennu.

Earth is 71 million miles (114M km) away in the photo, while Bennu is just 27 miles (43 km).

Earth and the Moon were able to be captured in the photo by overexposing the asteroid with a 5-second exposure.

Launched back in September 2016, OSIRIS-REx is scheduled to return Earth with its samples from Bennu on September 24th, 2023.

(via OSIRIS-REx via DPReview)

P.S. The most famous photo of Earth shot at a great distance is arguably Voyager-1’s Pale Blue Dot photo captured in February 1990. That photo was shot from a distance of 3.7 billion miles away.

Image credits: Photographs by NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona/Lockheed Martin Space