When we talk about 10 historical first moments in space photography, the excitement is palpable. From the daring V‑2 rocket snaps that first lifted Earth off the ground to the haunting silhouette of a black hole, each picture marks a milestone that changed how we see the cosmos.
10 The Very First Image Taken From Space
In October 1946, a daring team of scientists and soldiers in New Mexico propelled a V‑2 missile to a soaring 105 kilometres (65 mi) above the desert. This rocket carried a 35 mm camera that clicked a frame every one and a half seconds, reaching heights five times higher than any previous photograph.
When the film was finally developed, the reaction was electric. “They were ecstatic, they were jumping up and down like kids,” recalled Fred Rulli, an enlisted man on the camera‑recovery crew. “The scientists just went nuts.” The images revealed Earth as never before— a blue marble floating beyond the atmosphere. Over the next few years, more than a thousand pictures would be taken from space, but those 1946 frames remain the inaugural glimpse of our planet from the void.
9 The First Image Taken Of The Sun
The Sun, our steadfast companion, was a mystery for millennia because its glare made detailed observation painful. In 1845, at the dawn of photography, French physicists Louis Fizeau and Léon Foucault captured the first photographic image of the Sun on a 12.7 cm (5 in) daguerreotype. While sunspots had been recorded by naked eye as early as 28 BC, this daguerreotype offered a permanent, detailed record of those dark blemishes.
By 1858, systematic solar photography was underway, and between 1858 and 1872, Warren de la Rue at Kew Observatory in England catalogued over 3,000 solar images. He even photographed a solar eclipse in Spain in 1860. Today, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory streams near‑real‑time images of the Sun across multiple wavelengths, continuing the legacy of that pioneering 1845 photograph.
8 The First Image Taken From The Surface Of Our Moon
After several failed attempts, the Soviet Union’s Luna 9 became the first spacecraft to safely touch down on another world. On 3 February 1966, the probe landed in the Oceanus Procellarum— aptly named the “Ocean of Storms”— and unfurled a turret camera that snapped the inaugural photograph taken on a celestial body other than Earth.
Powered only by batteries, Luna 9 survived for three days, enough time to transmit a panoramic view of the lunar landscape. Remarkably, the first image was intercepted and published in England before the Soviet Union could officially announce its achievement, marking a historic moment in both space exploration and international media.
7 First Image Of Auroras And Lightning On Another Planet
During Voyager 1’s historic fly‑by of Jupiter on 5 March 1979, the spacecraft captured a black‑and‑white snapshot that revealed two dazzling phenomena on another world: the planet’s auroras and massive lightning storms. The three‑minute‑and‑12‑second exposure illuminated Jupiter’s curved horizon with shimmering auroral curtains while also freezing bright lightning bolts generated by planet‑wide storms.
This image was merely the beginning of Voyager’s discoveries. The same mission later unveiled Jupiter’s active volcanoes, its faint ring system, and two new moons. Today, Voyager 1 continues its odyssey, drifting over 21.9 billion km (13.6 billion mi) from the Sun, a testament to humanity’s reach into the interstellar abyss.
6 First Image Of An Interstellar Visitor To Our Solar System
On 19 October 2017, the Pan‑STARRS 1 telescope in Hawaii spotted a strange newcomer— initially labeled 1I/2017 U1. First thought to be a comet, the object showed no cometary activity, prompting reclassification as an asteroid. Yet its acceleration and extreme brightness variations, caused by a cigar‑shaped body rotating rapidly, defied conventional asteroid behavior.
Further analysis confirmed the object’s extra‑solar origin, making it the first confirmed interstellar visitor. Named ʻOumuamua (pronounced “oh MOO‑uh MOO‑uh”), a Hawaiian word meaning “a messenger from afar arriving first,” it zip‑ped through our system at 315 000 km/h (196 000 mph). The resulting image is a modest white speck against smeared stars, a seemingly humble picture for a truly extraordinary traveler.
5 First Image Of A Comet Hitting A Planet
Discovered in March 1993 by astronomers Eugene and Carolyn Shoemaker and David Levy, comet Shoemaker‑Levy 9 was unlike any before it. Rather than orbiting the Sun, it looped around Jupiter, likely captured decades earlier. After months of observation, the comet fragmented into 21 pieces and plummeted into Jupiter between 16 and 22 July 1994.
Although the Galileo spacecraft was still en route and unable to record the impact, ground‑based telescopes worldwide captured the dramatic event. The collisions, occurring on Jupiter’s far side, rotated into view shortly after, revealing dark scars that lingered for weeks before being swept away by the planet’s turbulent storms— a vivid first record of a comet striking a planet.
4 First Image Of An Exoplanet
For years, astronomers knew planets existed beyond our Sun, but their faint glow made direct imaging a daunting challenge. The breakthrough arrived with the Very Large Telescope (VLT) array—a quartet of 8.2‑meter mirrors (Antu, Kueyen, Melipal, and Yepun) complemented by four 1.8‑meter auxiliary telescopes. Working together, they could detect light four billion times fainter than the naked eye.
Using this powerful ensemble, scientists captured the first direct image of an exoplanet orbiting a brown dwarf 230 light‑years away. The planet, five times Jupiter’s size, became the inaugural exoplanet visible in a single photograph. Today, more than 4 000 exoplanets have been catalogued, but that first image remains a cornerstone of planetary science.
3 First Image Of An Unborn Exomoon
Finding exomoons is a Herculean task, but catching one in the act of forming is slightly more approachable. The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) zeroed in on a young planet surrounded by a bright ring of material—a circumplanetary disk. Unlike Saturn’s ice‑rich rings, this disk is forged from the same material that birthed the planet itself.
This observation marked the first time astronomers imaged a moon‑forming region around an exoplanet. Over time, the disk’s dust and gas will coalesce into one or more moons, offering a glimpse into how satellite systems may arise elsewhere in the galaxy.
2 First Image Of A Black Hole
Black holes, the cosmic heavyweights that even light cannot escape, seemed forever invisible— until the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) team linked eight ground‑based radio telescopes across the globe, effectively creating a planet‑sized virtual dish. The most distant pair, perched at the South Pole and in Spain, afforded an aperture nearly equal to Earth’s diameter.
In 2019, this global network captured the first image of a black hole’s shadow—a dark silhouette against the glowing accretion disk of a supermassive black hole 6.5 billion times the Sun’s mass, located 53 million light‑years away. The image proved Einstein’s predictions and opened a new window onto the most extreme objects in the universe.
1 First Image Of A Survivor After A Supernova
Supernovae unleash unfathomable energy, sometimes outshining entire galaxies for weeks. One such explosion, recorded in 1054, blazed the daytime sky for a month and lingered at night for nearly two years. The Type IIb stripped‑envelope supernova SN 2001ig, located about 40 million light‑years away in galaxy NGC 7424, resulted from a binary system where a companion star siphoned away most of its partner’s hydrogen envelope.
When the hydrogen‑star finally detonated, the companion— a massive star that had been feeding on its partner— survived. A decade later, the Hubble Space Telescope captured a striking image of this survivor, revealing the very star that had robbed its partner of hydrogen and triggered the supernova, offering a poignant glimpse of cosmic cause and effect.
10 Historical First Snapshots of Space
The ten images above collectively chart humanity’s visual odyssey from the first glimpse of Earth from above to the haunting silhouette of a black hole, each a 10 historical first that reshaped our understanding of the universe.