American space agency NASA’s Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC) has recently captured some breathtaking images of earth. The images provide some visually stunning view of earth.

According to NASA experts EPIC is placed aboard agency’s Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR), which orbits the sun about 1 million miles from Earth. This huge distance makes it a perfect point to capture earth’s sunlit area every two hours.

The agency has even released a video showing how this location of EPIC allows it to captures some distinct features of earth like its clouds, particulates in the air or volcanic ash clouds. It also details about the energy budget of the planet. This information is of very much importance to scientists as it helps to prepare climate models.

The recent images sent by EPIC were released today at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union. “We've accustomed to see images of earth from space. But full earth views have only been seen by astronauts on their way to the moon, and handful of retreating probes, like Galileo, as they peered back toward home for the last time”, says the new video produced at the NASA Goddard Spaceflight Center.

The video explained that there are several satellites that are presently orbiting earth and provide HD images of the planet every day. But as these satellites are very close, they cannot capture earth’s entire face all at once. These satellites have to take several images as they revolve in the orbit around earth.

Jay Herman, EPIC instrument lead investigator at Goddard, said in a statement that using the data sent by EPIC scientists could see storms or clouds of dust as they move across the planet.