Space Shuttle separation

To celebrate Earth Day, NASA released some of its most beautiful and surprising images of our planet.

Although the entire collection features dozens of images and photographs of a wide variety of subjects--from hurricanes to volcano eruptions to data visualizations of things like average rainfalls and terrain height--CNET has chosen these 20 images to represent the best of Earth, as seen from high above.

In this incredible image taken from the International Space Station, we see the underside of the Space Shuttle just after the spacecraft completed its post-undocking relative separation on April 17, 2010.