The European Space Agency's comet-chasing Rosetta spacecraft has now begun to spy its destination after waking up in January from a 10-year voyage across the solar system and a long hibernation in deep space.

The OSIRIS wide-angle camera and narrow-angle camera aboard Rosetta captured the first light images on March 20 and 21. The pictures were amazingly captured from more than three million miles away from the comet.

"Finally seeing our target after a 10 year journey through space is an incredible feeling. These first images taken from such a huge distance show us that OSIRIS is ready for the upcoming adventure", said Holger Sierks, the OSIRIS principal investigator from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany.

Not even a single pixel is filled up by the light from the faraway 2.5-mile-wide comet. But what to say about the researchers, they obtained a series of 60-300 second exposures to somehow make it possible to create the image. Each image took 37 minutes to land on earth and about an hour for each to download, said ESA officials.

This is certainly not the first time when the Rosetta spacecraft has taken of its comet. The target in the pictures, captured in 2011 from a distance of about 101 million miles, appears as a single point of the light. But, the animation from ESA has showed that the view of Rosetta spacecraft will only get better as it closes in on the comet.

The Rosetta spacecraft headed for the comet immediately after waking from the long hibernation. A small probe will be launched by the European spacecraft as soon as it reaches there. It will be the first time in the history when the spacecraft will land on the surface of a comet. The spacecraft will examine the small-scale surface features of the comet in August and Septembers in addition to finding signs of geological activity.