In a historic first – just one of many that will be made over the next several months, to be sure! – the New Horizons spacecraft captured its first color image of Pluto and its partner/satellite Charon on April 9 from a distance of 71 million miles – about equivalent to that between Venus and the Sun. The orange blobs above are the two worlds locked in an orbital dance a mere 12,200 miles apart… that’s 20 times less than the distance between Earth and the Moon!

The image was captured with New Horizons’ “Ralph” instrument, a Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera (MVIC) built for the mission by Ball Aerospace (which is a spinoff of the same company that became famous in the U.S. for its glass canning jars.)

Ralph is one of six science instruments aboard New Horizons; it is paired with “Alice,” an ultraviolet imaging camera. (Think Ralph and Alice Kramden.) When New Horizons makes its close pass by Pluto and Charon on July 14 these cameras will capture details of the icy worlds like never before seen.

Ralph will be the main eyes for New Horizons during its July flyby. it will capture images of Pluto’s surface to a resolution of 250 meters (850 feet) per pixel and also be able to map surface temperatures as well as scan for the presence of nitrogen, water, and carbon monoxide.

“This is pure exploration; we’re going to turn points of light into a planet and a system of moons before your eyes!” said Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator from Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado. “New Horizons is flying to Pluto — the biggest, brightest and most complex of the dwarf planets in the Kuiper Belt. This 21st century encounter is going to be an exploration bonanza unparalleled in anticipation since the storied missions of Voyager in the 1980s.”

Read more: Closing In on Pluto: An Interview with Principal Investigator Alan Stern

Traveling over 31,000 mph New Horizons is now within 1 AU of Pluto and Charon and getting closer every day, every hour, every second. This image is only a hint at what we’ll soon be seeing from this far-flung member of our planetary family!

Read more on the New Horizons mission site here.

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