Are there any space pictures of the Sun from distances much greater than Earth?
One candidate is my very favorite Mars Pathfinder image, because there is something special about this sunset: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap970804.html Mars is only about 50% further out from the Sun than the Earth, so the Sun still largely “looks like” the Sun. In the early 1990s, one of the two Voyager spacecraft took several images of the inner solar system from a distance of many billions of kilometers. The late Carl Sagan published some of them in the book Pale Blue Dot. The title comes from the appearance of the planet Earth at such a distance. Here’s what we look like from 6.4 billion km away: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/calendar/vgr_fam.html (The Voyager Family Portrait) As you can see, the Sun is 40 times smaller in diameter when viewed from such a distance. Remember that most spacecraft — the Hubble Space Telescope, for example — try very hard to keep their instruments pointed away from the Sun. Staring at the Sun can be as damaging to a spacecraft sensor as it can be to
