On this day in space: Feb. 14, 1990: Voyager 1 takes solar system 'Family Portrait'

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On Feb. 14, 1990, NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft took the first family portrait of the solar system!

On Feb. 14, 1990, NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft took the first family portrait of the solar system!

NASA's Voyager 1 interplanetary probe directed is cameras back toward the sun and took a series of images of the planets, making the first ever "family portrait" of our solar system on Feb. 14, 1990. (Image credit: NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory-Caltech)

Famed astronomer Carl Sagan spent years trying to convince NASA to have Voyager 1 turn around and take this picture on the way out. The picture is actually a mosaic that combines sixty frames.

It shows Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter, Venus and Earth, which showed up as a tiny speck now famously known as the Pale Blue Dot.

On This Day in Space: See our full 365-day video archive!

Hanneke Weitering
Hanneke Weitering
Contributing expert

Hanneke Weitering is a multimedia journalist in the Pacific Northwest reporting on the future of aviation at FutureFlight.aero and Aviation International News and was previously the Editor for Spaceflight and Astronomy news here at Space.com. As an editor with over 10 years of experience in science journalism she has previously written for Scholastic Classroom Magazines, MedPage Today and The Joint Institute for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. After studying physics at the University of Tennessee in her hometown of Knoxville, she earned her graduate degree in Science, Health and Environmental Reporting (SHERP) from New York University. Hanneke joined the Space.com team in 2016 as a staff writer and producer, covering topics including spaceflight and astronomy. She currently lives in Seattle, home of the Space Needle, with her cat and two snakes. In her spare time, Hanneke enjoys exploring the Rocky Mountains, basking in nature and looking for dark skies to gaze at the cosmos. 

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