They may not look like much more than blue-green smudges, but the images are record-breakers. The machine that took these photos was farther from Earth than any other functioning camera in existence.
NASA released the pictures, captured at the end of 2017 by the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager, on Thursday. The imager is one of seven instruments aboard the New Horizons spacecraft that reached Pluto in 2015. The camera photographed three subjects in December: a star group nicknamed the Wishing Well, as well as two objects closer to home that are part of the band of rocks, ice clumps and dwarf planets at the edge of our solar system called the Kuiper belt.