A recently released photograph has shown the largest moon of Pluto Charon cloaked in darkness, with only a little sliver lit up by the far away sun.

The image was clicked by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft on July 17, 2015, three days post the probe's historic flyby of Pluto. NASA officials said that in that close encounter, New Horizons reached within only 7,800 miles (12,550 kilometers) of the surface of Pluto; Charon’s night-side view on the other hand, was captured from a distance of 1.9 million miles.

In the image description released on Friday, January 22, agency officials wrote that Charon's nighttime landscapes are still barely noticeable due to light softly reflected off Pluto, just like ‘Earthshine’ lightens a new moon every month.

The officials added that the New Horizons team scientists have been using this and similar pictures for mapping parts of Charon otherwise not noticeable during the flyby. They mentioned, “This includes Charon's south pole — toward the top of this image — which entered polar night in 1989 and will not see sunlight again until 2107. Charon's polar temperatures drop to near absolute zero during this long winter”.

Charon is 753 miles (1,207 km) in diameter, and is over 50% as wide as the dwarf planet itself. The other four moons of Pluto Nix, Hydra, Kerberos and Styx all are smaller by comparison. For instance, Nix and Hydra are only 33 miles and 27 miles, respectively, in their longest directions, whereas Styx and Kerberos are even tinnier.

The New Horizons mission costing $720 million was launched 10 years back in January 2006. Presently, the probe is approaching a likely January 2019 flyby of a tiny object known as 2014 MU69, lying nearly 1 billion miles beyond Pluto.