Pictures of Earth From Space

Earth looks teeny tiny in this picture taken from Mars by the Curiosity rover earlier this month.

Here we see the well-known "Earthrise" photo taken on the Apollo 8 mission. As NASA explains it, "On Dec. 24, 1968, Apollo 8 astronauts Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders were coming around from the far side of the Moon on their fourth orbit. Borman began to roll the spacecraft, and as he did, the Earth rose into view over the Moon’s limb. Anders, photographing the Moon from the right side window, caught sight of the view and exclaimed: 'Oh, my God, look at that picture over there! There’s the Earth comin’ up. Wow, is that pretty!' He snapped a black-and-white photo, capturing humanity’s first view of Earth from another planetary body."

In 2011, this photo was taken from the International Space Station, giving us a unique look at the agricultural landscape in the western part of the Minas Gerais state in Brazil.

This classic picture of Earth was taken on Dec. 7, 1972, by the Apollo 17 crew on its way to the moon. It captures the space between the Mediterranean Sea and the Antarctica South Polar ice cap.

You might have to look hard to see it, but the Messenger captured this view of the Earth and the moon from Mercury on May 6, 2010. The spacecraft was a whopping 114 million miles away from Earth.

Has a photo of land ever looked prettier? You're looking at the harvest of eastern Kazakhstan taken Sep. 9, 2013, from the Landsat 8 satellite. We see several fields that are already harvested and bare and others that are dark green with pasture grasses or ripening crops.

In this incredible photo taken on July 19, 2013, a wide-angle camera on NASA's Cassini spacecraft captures Saturn's rings, Earth, and its moon in the same frame.

On Jan. 19, 2014, a camera on NASA’s Aqua satellite took this photo of a bloom of microscopic organisms off the southeastern coast of Brazil. The dark patches are the waters of the South Atlantic stretching as much as 500 miles from south to northeast. The strands of white are clouds.

Although not totally clear, this is the first picture of Earth ever taken from another planet that shows it as a planetary disk. Here, we see the Earth and the moon from Mars, captured by the NASA Mars Global Surveyor on May 8, 2003.