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You might have seen Saturn photobomb the moon and a comet get in a shot with the Rosetta spacecraft, but have you ever seen the red planet turn up in a picture of the blue one?

In an image of Earth taken from the moon our planet appears large and easily visible, but a much smaller speck of light reveals the fourth planet in the solar system - Mars - in the same shot.

Despite being 300 times further than our own planet, the planet can just about be spotted with a keen eye in one of the longest-distance photobombs ever.

Washington DC-based Nasa has released an image of Mars and Earth (shown, Mars is in the red ring). The picture was taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. This spacecraft in lunar orbit normally images the surface of the moon. But this time it was pointed towards Earth to capture the rare photo

The image was taken by Nasa's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter on 24 May this year.

Usually the spacecraft is used to photograph the moon, but on this occasion it was pointed back at Earth to see our planet and Mars together.

In the image Earth is about 234,062 miles (376,687 km) from the spacecraft.

Mars, meanwhile, is 70 million miles (112.5 million km) away - 300 times further than Earth.

The image was taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC), which is actually a set of two narrow-angle cameras (NACs) on the spacecraft.

The images were built from rows of pixels taken by each of the cameras.

However the cameras can't move by themselves and instead always point in the same direction.

This means that they rely on the movement of the spacecraft to take a picture.

To make Mars more visible a technique known as contrast stretching was used, making the planet more noticeable against the enormity of Earth.

'This view of Earth includes several cloud patterns that satellites observe frequently,' Nasa writes on their site. 

'A line of rain and thunderstorms are visible in a band near the equator, an area known as the Intertropical Convergence Zone.

'To the north, off the west coast of North Africa, notice the banks of closed-cell clouds over the Atlantic Ocean.

'Moving into the high latitudes, we see comma-shaped cloud patterns caused by extra-tropical cyclones.'

In the image Earth is about 234,062 miles (376,687 km) from the spacecraft. Mars, meanwhile, is 70 million miles (112.5 million kilometres) away - 300 times further than Earth. The images were built from rows of pixels taken by each of the cameras on Nasa's LRO spacecraft

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), illustration shown, entered lunar orbit in June 2009 equipped with seven instrument suites to map the surface, probe the radiation environment, investigate water and key mineral resources, and gather geological clues about the moon's evolution

In August skygazers were treated to a stunning photobomb of the moon by Saturn, as the ringed planet peeked into view behind our natural satellite (shown). In Western Australia, the event could be seen with the naked eye as Saturn disappeared behind the moon and reappeared on the other side