In honor of the late Clyde Tombaugh, the man who discovered Pluto, NASA has released the New Horizons probe's first images of the planet to celebrate the astronomer on his birthday.

"My dad would be thrilled with New Horizons," Tombaugh's daughter Annette said in a statement from the space agency. "To actually see the planet that he had discovered, and find out more about it - to get to see the moons of Pluto-- he would have been astounded. I'm sure it would have meant so much to him if he were still alive today."

The images, captured late last month, are not exactly high-res, but New Horizons is some 203 million kilometers away from the dwarf planet. It will be about 60 days until New Horizons gets to Pluto and 99 days until the satellite beams back what are expected to be the clearest images of the planet on record, the Washington Post reported.

Tombaugh first discovered Pluto in 1930 and Wednesday would have been his 109th birthday.

"This is our birthday tribute to Professor Tombaugh and the Tombaugh family, in honor of his discovery and life achievements - which truly became a harbinger of 21st century planetary astronomy," Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator at the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado, said in NASA's statement. "These images of Pluto, clearly brighter and closer than those New Horizons took last July from twice as far away, represent our first steps at turning the pinpoint of light Clyde saw in the telescopes at Lowell Observatory 85 years ago, into a planet before the eyes of the world this summer."