​'Simply stunning’: Incredible images of Earth from space

Voyager photographs the homeworld from two distinct angles. For the first time in history, a single frame captured the entirety of the Earth and Moon in 1977 at a distance of 7.3 million miles (11.7 million kilometers). Earth appears as a small blue dot in a ray of sunshine in the second photo, which was shot in 1990 as part of a "family portrait of our solar system from 4 billion miles (6.4 billion kilometers)." This is the well-known "Pale Blue Dot" picture that Carl Sagan immortalized. (Image credit: NASA)

NASA’s Kepler mission captured Earth’s image as it passed by at a distance of 94 million miles (151 million kilometers). The reflection was so intensely bright that it obscured the nearby Moon by causing a saturation leak across the instrument's sensors that resembled a sword. (NASA photo)

When the spacecraft pointed its cameras at Earth in 2013, hundreds of people there waved, providing a stunning view of our planet as a dot beneath Saturn's rings. Then, when Cassini spiraled in for its Grand Finale at Saturn in 2017, the spacecraft captured this last image of Earth between Saturn's rings. (NASA photo)

The Earth image reminds the astronaut Harrison Schmitt's well-known "Blue Marble" photo from Apollo 17, which also had a prominent image of Africa." – Noah Petro, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter mission's deputy project scientist at NASA. (NASA picture)

​As part of an engineering test, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft captured this image of Earth and the Moon in January 2018 from a distance of 39.5 million miles (63.6 million kilometers). When the camera acquired the image, the spacecraft was moving away from our home planet at a speed of 19,000 miles per hour (8.5 kilometers per second). Earth is the largest, brightest spot in the center of the image, with the smaller, dimmer Moon appearing to the right. (NASA picture)
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"This image from the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) satellite captured a unique view of the Moon as it moved in front of the sunlit side of Earth in 2015. It provides a view of the far side of the Moon, which is never directly visible to us here on Earth. “I found this perspective profoundly moving and only through our satellite views could this have been shared.” - Michael Freilich, Director of NASA’s Earth Science Division (NASA picture)

The Galileo spacecraft looked back eight days after its last rendezvous with Earth, the second of two gravitational aids from Earth that helped send the spacecraft to Jupiter, and took this amazing picture of our planet and its Moon. At a distance of roughly 3.9 million miles (6.2 million kilometers), the picture was captured. (NASA picture)

During its third and last orbit around Earth in 2009, the European Space Agency's comet-bound Rosetta spacecraft captured this view of our globe from a distance of roughly 393,000 miles (633,000 kilometers). (NASA photo)