NASA has shared stunning portraits of Pluto, as well as detailed close-ups, and now unveiled a backlit image of the distant dwarf planet.

According to BBC News, the new images show a distinct haze in Pluto's atmosphere, which has been seen in previous images, though not in such detail. Also spotted in the new images was various surface features like mountains and plains.

"This image really makes you feel you are there, at Pluto, surveying the landscape for yourself," Alan Stern, New Horizons' principal investigator at the Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, Colo., said in a press release. "But this image is also a scientific bonanza, revealing new details about Pluto's atmosphere, mountains, glaciers and plains."

In the release, NASA stated New Horizons took the images on July 14 with its wide-angle Ralph/Multispectral Visual Imaging Camera (MVIC).

"We did not expect to find hints of a nitrogen-based glacial cycle on Pluto operating in the frigid conditions of the outer solar system," Alan Howard, a member of the mission's Geology, Geophysics and Imaging team from the University of Virginia, said in the release. "Driven by dim sunlight, this would be directly comparable to the hydrological cycle that feeds ice caps on Earth, where water is evaporated from the oceans, falls as snow, and returns to the seas through glacial flow."

Most striking about the observations was how they made Pluto feel like less of a distant neighbor.

"Pluto is surprisingly Earth-like in this regard," Stern said, "and no one predicted it."