There's a new image of the Earth over the moon's stark surface, and while it may not be as important as the photo shot by Apollo Astronaut William Anders in 1968, it's still breathtaking.

The earthrise in question was captured in February by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's unmanned Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which observes 12 such events every day as it circles the moon.

According to a NASA news release, the LRO is almost always pointing its camera downward, imaging the lunar surface, as it was designed to do, and rarely gets an opportunity to snap even a shot or two of the Blue Planet as it appears to rise and set over the landscape of its natural satellite.

However, on Feb. 1, 2014, the LRO pitched forward while approaching the moon's north pole, giving its wide angle camera an opportunity to capture Earth rising above Rozhdestvenskiy crater, which has a diameter of about 112 miles.

The LRO's wide angle camera is very different from most other digital cameras, as a single one of its frames comprises only 9,856 pixels -- compared to a standard cell phone camera, which boasts more than 5 million pixels, or, 5 megapixels.

But the WAC builds up a much larger image by exposing a series of images -- or frames -- as LRO progresses in its orbit, a process called "push-frame."

Over a full month, as the LRO orbit track progresses around the moon, the wide angle unit builds up a collection of images that covers the entire globe.

During those occasional times the LRO points off into space to acquire observations of the moon's exosphere or calibrate its on-board instruments, the Earth and other planets may pass through the wide angle camera's field of view -- resulting in dramatic images like the earthscape posted here, in which the moon is actually a greyscale composite and the image of earth itself is a color composite of later frames.

NASA technicians adjusted the captured wavelengths to correspond with what the human eye best perceives -- and ended up with a representation of our planet quite true to the colors humans generally see.

The image's relative brightness of the Earth compared to the darker moon is correct, NASA said.

One Dec. 24, 1968, Anders, serving as lunar module pilot for the Apollo 8 mission -- the first mission in which humans traveled beyond low Earth orbit to reach and orbit the moon for the first time -- pointed a camera out from one of the windows of the spacecraft to snap his now-famous "Earthrise" photograph.