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Pluto-Bound New Horizons Takes a Distant Look at Neptune with labels

View of the giant planet Neptune and its large moon Triton
NASA's Pluto-bound New Horizons spacecraft captured this view of the giant planet Neptune and its large moon Triton.

NASA’s Pluto-bound New Horizons spacecraft captured this view of the giant planet Neptune and its large moon Triton on July 10, 2014, from a distance of about 2.45 billion miles (3.96 billion kilometers) – more than 26 times the distance between the Earth and sun. The 967-millisecond exposure was taken with the New Horizons telescopic Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI).

New Horizons traverses the orbit of Neptune on Aug. 25, 2014 – its last planetary orbit crossing before beginning an encounter with Pluto in January 2015. In fact, at the time of the orbit crossing, New Horizons was much closer to its target planet – just about 273 million miles (or 440 million kilometers) – than to Neptune.

Image credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute