This is what the Earth looks like from a million miles away

GREENBELT, Md., July 20 (UPI) -- NASA's high-powered camera attached to NOAA's Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) satellite has returned its first photo of a sun-lit Earth.

The image reveals Earth as it looks from 1 million miles away. What looks like a photographic image is actually a combination of three science images snapped by NASA's Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC).

NASA's EPIC camera records images at different wavelengths, from ultraviolet to near infrared. The photograph-like image of Earth is formed by combining red, green and blue channel images.

Because of the way the atmosphere scatters the light bouncing back off Earth, the image looks bluish -- overemphasizing the planet's ocean and atmospheric features. But scientists with the EPIC team are working to recalibrate the composite image to emphasize Earth's land masses.

"The high quality of the EPIC images exceeded all of our expectations in resolution," Adam Szabo, DSCOVR project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, said in a press release. "The images clearly show desert sand structures, river systems and complex cloud patterns. There will be a huge wealth of new data for scientists to explore."

DSCOVR orbits the Earth at such an large distance in order to have the ideal vantage from which to monitor variable solar wind conditions and predict the arrival of mass coronal ejections spit out of the sun.

With more accurate monitoring of the solar winds and waves that regularly bombard Earth, electricity and telecom companies, as well as the U.S. military, can better anticipate and account for potential interruptions in power grids and communication systems.

"These new views of the Earth, a result of the great partnership between NOAA, the U.S. Air Force, and NASA, give us an important perspective of the true global nature of our spaceship Earth," said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate.