Animated gif shows Pluto through the years
Oh how far we've gone.
This animation, released by NASA one day after its New Horizons probe made history by flying past Pluto, at the edge of the solar system, combines images taken of the distant dwarf over the course of eight decades.
The first frame -- provided by Lowell Observatory Archives -- is a digital enlargement of the speck that would become what was once considered our ninth planet, Pluto, as it appeared upon its discovery by Clyde Tombaugh in 1930. Following that are views of Pluto -- now officially designated a dwarf planet -- as seen by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope beginning in the 1990s.
The visual trip through space and time ends with pictures from New Horizons as it approached its target, capped off by a zoomed-in close-up of Pluto's icy, mountainous surface, released on July 15, 2015.