50 Extremely Rare Historical Pictures That Will Completely And Totally Change Your Perspective On The Universe

1. This is what the Space Shuttle Endeavour looked like as it left Earth and traveled into orbit:

2. This is what a typhoon looks like from space:

3. This is how big Earth is compared to Saturn:

4. This is what a sunset looks like from space:

5. This is a picture of Pluto and its moons taken in 2006...

6. And this is a much, much clearer picture of Pluto taken only a decade later, in 2015:

7. On Feb. 7, 1984, Bruce McCandless II performed the first-ever untethered space walk, and folks, it looks absolutely terrifying:

8. This is a picture of the ice mountains of Pluto as seen from the New Horizons space probe:

9. This is what New Zealand looks like from space:

10. This is how big an average-sized comet is compared to Paris:

11. This is a REAL picture of the moon crossing in front of the Earth:

12. This is what a solar eclipse looks like from space:

13. In 1972, astronaut Charles Duke left behind a picture of his family on the moon's surface. It's been there ever since:

14. This picture, taken in 1946, is one of the first images of Earth ever taken from space:

15. And this is the first picture of Earth from the moon, taken in 1966 by Lunar Orbiter 1:

16. And this is a picture of Earth that was taken 20 minutes before this article was published:

17. The Mars rovers are way, way bigger than you thought they were:

18. This is how big the Moon and Pluto's moon Charon are compared to the Earth:

19. This is what a piece of the moon and a piece of Mars looks like:

20. This is what color Venus is in real life:

21. These are two of the earliest known photographs of Saturn and Jupiter, taken in the 19th century:

22. You're probably familiar with the "Face on Mars," an image of a formation on Mars from the 1970s that launched a million conspiracy theories...

23. ...well, this is what a much less blurry, much more recent photograph of that same "face" looks like:

24. Space and time is absolutely nuts:

25. Buzz Aldrin took humanity's first "space selfie" while on a spacewalk in 1966:

26. Mars is home to the tallest mountain in the solar system, the 72,000-foot-tall Olympus Mons:

27. There's a bunch of trash left by humans on the moon. In fact, if you really want to know, there are 96 bags of human waste on that big pie in the sky:

28. Here's a computer illustration of what Olympus Mons looks like from space:

29. This is what Antarctica looks like from space:

30. This is Eugene Cernan, who is, as of 2023, the last man to ever walk on the moon:

31. You might recognize Eugene from this iconic picture of his moon walk:

32. This is the Willamette meteorite, the largest meteorite that's ever been found in the United States:

33. And this is the Hoba meteorite, the largest meteorite on Earth:

34. The Great Red Spot on Jupiter is shrinking:

35. See that little hole there? This is what Mount Vesuvius looks like from space:

36. Way out on the edge of the Solar System is this big ol' hunk of rock called Ultima Thule, Arrokoth, or (486958) 2014 MU69 — the farthest thing from Earth humanity has ever "explored up close ":

37. In 2018, NASA captured an unreal-looking rectangular iceberg:

38. NASA's James Webb Space Telescope just took some brand-new pictures of Uranus. Here's what one of the new photos looks like:

39. While we're at it, here's another new picture from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, this time of Neptune:

40. This, to scale, is how far apart the Milky Way galaxy and the Andromeda galaxy are:

41. This is a close-up of some well-worn pebbles on the surface of Mars:

42. Speaking of Mars, this is what a sunset looks like on that there planet:

43. This is what the moon looks like in the Northern Hemisphere...

44. ...and this is what the moon looks like in the Southern Hemisphere. It's upside down:

45. This is what Jupiter would look like if it were as close as the moon:

46. This is what Ireland looks like from space:

47. This is astronaut Joseph P. Allen IV doing maintenance on a satellite in the middle of the cold, dark void of space:

48. This is what the eye of a hurricane looks like from above:

49. This is the last image NASA's InSight rover sent from Mars before running out of power at the end of its mission last December:

50. And finally, this is the statement President Jimmy Carter wrote and put aboard the Voyager 1 spacecraft, intended for any aliens the probe might encounter: