By Wael Abdelgawad for IslamicSunrays.com

Click on the image above and allow yourself a few minutes to do nothing but gaze at it. Really think about what you are seeing. Isn’t it beautiful and astounding? SubhanAllah.

To me, the amazing thing is that it’s a simple image of a small (some might say insignificant) creature in Allah’s universe. It’s not a big-budget film popping with special effects and designed to elicit a canned emotional response, or a classic novel, or a grand symphony, or a skilled musician playing a soul-stirring solo on a guitar.

It’s just a capture of the light shining on a little flower that most of us would probably pay no attention to if we walked past it.

Rather than insert my thoughts here, I would like to ask you:

What does this image do for you? What does it make you think? How does it make you feel?

These spectacular images of the Earth are the most true-colour images of the entire world released to date, according to Nasa scientists.

The images of the Indian Ocean and North America were produced by researchers at Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Center using images from the Terra satellite more than 700km (435 miles) above the Earth’s surface.

The Blue Marble series was pieced together from thousands of images taken over many months by the satellite’s remote-sensing device Modis, of every square kilometre of the Earth’s surface.

Click on the thumbnails to see the amazing full-size photos.