It's been an incredible period of space travel in recent months, with ESA successfully landing on a comet and NASA's sending its New Horizons craft all the way to Pluto to capture the most illuminating images of the dwarf planet we've ever seen.

But the American space agency has also released a number of images from much closer to home, sharing a collection of photos showing what the planet Earth looks like from space at night time. The stunning images, revealing the lit-up cites of Europe, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and North and South America, look beautiful. The high definition have been specially edited using various techniques, allowing NASA to add a vertical exaggeration of the relief based on a digital terrain model.

Check out the gallery of images below: