About how far from Earth was Voyager 1 when it took the Pale Blue Dot image?
Answer
6 billion kilometers
About how far from Earth was Voyager 1 when it took the Pale Blue Dot image? Voyager 1 was about 6 billion kilometers from Earth when it took the Pale Blue Dot image.
More precisely, the spacecraft was approximately 40.47 astronomical units from Earth, or about 6.055 billion kilometers—roughly 3.762 billion miles. That immense distance made Earth appear as less than a single pixel in the narrow-angle camera's frame.
The image was captured on February 14, 1990, while Voyager 1 was traveling away from the outer planets. It formed part of a sequence showing the Solar System from far beyond the orbit of Saturn. Sunlight reflecting inside the camera created bright bands across the picture; those streaks are not physical structures in space.
The distance is often rounded to 6 billion kilometers in popular descriptions. It should not be confused with Voyager 1's continually increasing present-day distance, or with the roughly five-and-a-half-hour light-travel time for the image data to reach Earth.