This Photo Of The Earth And The Moon, Taken From 71 Million Miles Away, Is Eerily Beautiful

The gorgeous photo was taken by NASA's OSIRIS-REx, a mission to study and collect samples from Bennu, an asteroid near Earth:

The Earth and the moon are the tinier white objects you can see on the lower left corner of the picture. The much larger object on the upper right is Bennu, the asteroid which OSIRIS-REx is currently studying, orbiting and eventually collecting samples from. Should the mission succeed, OSIRIS-REx will be the first US spacecraft to collect samples from an asteroid and send them back to Earth.

The picture was taken from quite a fair distance from Earth and the moon — around 71 million miles. Bennu, on the other hand, was much closer to the spacecraft with a mere distance of 27 miles. To capture this image of Earth and the moon, the image was exposed for five seconds, which has rendered Benno to appear highly overexposed.

[Read more at OSIRIS-REx; Via PetaPixel]