NASA’s New Horizons space probe launched on Jan. 19, 2006, and has been snapping pictures as it approached Pluto.
It flew within 6,000 miles of Pluto on Tuesday morning, resulting in the closest and best images of Pluto humankind has ever seen. Over the course of its travel in the past year, as the gif shows, some of the snaps of Pluto have been far less than crisp.
For more information on how Pluto is photographed, check out Photographing Pluto: This Is How New Horizons Works.
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Read next: The Pluto Encounter Means More Than You Think
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