The home planet and moon from the Juno Spacecraft on August 26, 2011. Click for larger. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI

The Juno spacecraft, launched on August 5, 2011 and enroute to Jupiter turned its camera towards the Earth and Moon on August 26, 2011.

At the time the picture was taken the spacecraft was already 6 million miles (9.7 million km) away during a instrument and subsystem check including the JunoCam.

When I saw the image the first thing I though of was “we don’t look so high and mighty do we” and that sort of sentiment is shared by Scott Bolton Juno principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio:

“This is a remarkable sight people get to see all too rarely, this view of our planet shows how Earth looks from the outside, illustrating a special perspective of our role and place in the universe. We see a humbling yet beautiful view of ourselves.”

We’ve not seen the last of Juno yet, the trip to Jupiter consists of a couple of large “loops” and the spacecraft will get a gravity assist during a flyby of Earth in about two years (October 2013) before its eventual arrival at Jupiter in 2016.

Visit the Juno website at http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/juno/main/index.html