Recent picture of Earth taken from space this week reveals new details that people didn't expect

A new photo of the Earth from space has left people asking a lot of questions about how the planet looks.

When you think about the Earth, one or two colors are probably the first things that come to mind.

One is of course blue, which makes you think that it's ironic our home is called 'Earth' when most of it is covered in water.

But it's the other which has people asking a lot of questions after they saw the color of the landmasses.

You might be thinking that they would mostly be green, since that's what most maps or visualisations of the earth that's what we picture.

But there was one key difference that had people surprised and asking a lot of questions.

So what was it about this that had people scratching their heads?

The earth from space (GOES-East / NOAA/STAR)

Well, it was that the landmasses were less green and more brown.

People took to social media to share their thoughts on the extraordinary picture.

One wrote: "Way more brown than I expected. North and South America both look like vast deserts."

Meanwhile, another said: "Nowhere near as green as it should be," while a third wrote: "Simultaneously more green and more brown than I expected."

Another person explained some fun facts about the image.

They wrote: "This particular photo was taken less than 30,000 km away, on the outbound trajectory towards the Moon, two dozen people have seen a view similar to this, I think Apollo 17 was the only mission that had a view of fully illuminated Earth at any point in their flight."

Meanwhile, someone else joked: "It’s so wild to think that I am actually in this picture."

People were left stunned by the picture (Roberto Machado Noa / Getty)

As for the image itself, it was taken from the GOES-East Satellite which provides some live images of Earth.

Some people were also left a little surprised by the amount of clouds that there were over the planet.

Of course, some clouds are to be expected when you're looking at the Earth from space, but there were rather a lot of them there.

One person asked: "Is that amount of cloud coverage normal?"

Another answered them and explained that at any one time there is cloud coverage of around 67 percent over the Earth.

Such extraordinary pictures really hammer home the big questions about our place in the universe.

Taking to Reddit, one person reflected: "I can't fathom standing somewhere and looking at the Earth, yet a dozen people have done so. "