American space agency NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) recently caught a stunning image of earth from the craft’s vantage point in orbit around the moon.

Noah Petro, Deputy Project Scientist for LRO at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland said in a statement that the latest image by LRO is really stunning. “The image of the Earth evokes the famous 'Blue Marble' image taken by Astronaut Harrison Schmitt during Apollo 17, 43 years ago, which also showed Africa prominently in the picture”, he said.

In the image earth can be seen rising from over the lunar horizon from the viewpoint of the spacecraft. The large tanned area in the image in the upper right is the Sahara Desert and just beyond is Saudi Arabia, said NASA officials.

The Atlantic and Pacific coasts of South America are also visible in the image towards the left. LRO was launched on June 18, 2009, and since its launch it has captured bulks of vital data using its seven powerful instruments, which has contributed in increasing the valuable knowledge about the moon.

According to NASA, LRO in a day observes around 12 earthrises. LRO points off into space to acquire observations of the extremely thin lunar atmosphere and perform instrument calibration measurements.

The latest image was composed using a series of images captured on October 12, when LRO was about 83 miles above the moon’s farside crater Compton.

As per previous records, NASA's first Earthrise image was taken with the Lunar Orbiter 1 spacecraft in 1966.