NASA posted this remarkable image on Friday showing the Earth "rising" above the lunar horizon. The picture was captured by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, a small spacecraft in permanent orbit around the moon for the past six years. The LRO’s mission is to take images of the moon’s surface, however its cameras were reconfigured earlier this year to examine the lunar atmosphere, capturing this shot of the Earth as it passed through the field of vision.
NASA's LRO recently captured this view of Earth from the spacecraft's vantage point in orbit around the moon
According to NASA, the picture is made from a combination of shots from the onboard narrow-angle camera, which takes high-resolution images in black and white, and the wide-angle camera that takes low-resolution images in color. NASA revealed this type of "Earth rise" visual would be impossible to see from the lunar surface, only from an orbiting craft. “Since the moon is tidally locked, Earth is always in the same spot above the horizon, varying only a small amount with the slight wobble of the moon,” explained Mark Robinson of Arizona State University. Read more about NASA's high-resolution Earth rise Image here.
Below is a selection of NASA's most famous images: