NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Kevin M. Gill
This striking view of Jupiter's Great Red Spot and turbulent southern hemisphere was captured by NASA's Juno spacecraft as it performed a close pass of the gas giant planet on February 12, 2019.
- NASA spacecraft and telescopes have captured stunning photos of the solar system for decades.
- The first image taken in space came from a rocket camera in 1946. Before that, astronomers took black-and-white images of celestial objects using telescopes on Earth.
- If you were a kid in the 1960s, you grew up with the first images taken on the moon. Since the 1970s, spacecraft have been visiting the solar system's distant planets, returning photos of turbulent atmospheres, colorful rings, and bizarre moons.
- Here are the best photos of our solar system through the last 12 decades.
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For decades, scientists have pointed Earthly lenses toward the sky to capture images of the cosmos. Even the earliest rockets that launched off the planet brought cameras into space.
At first, our photos of the solar system came back grainy, unclear, and colorless. The very first image taken in space, for example, came from a 33mm motion-picture camera that American scientists strapped to a captured German rocket and launched off Earth at the end of World War II. The camera fell back to Earth and shattered, but the film survived.
Other early solar-system images came as NASA and the Soviet Union explored the moon for the first time - people born in the 1950s and 60s grew up with the iconic photos of the first astronauts walking on the moon.
Since then, increasingly sophisticated missions have ventured farther into space with better and better cameras. Kids in the '80s got the first up-close images of Saturn and Neptune, while children today are accustomed to high-quality colorful shots of the deserts of Mars and swirling clouds of Jupiter.
Here are the best photos of our solar system from the decade you were born.