Leave it to NASA to find the most compelling imagery of the East Coast blizzard. While the storm was slamming areas from Washington, D.C., to Cape Cod this weekend with high winds, record snow and coastal flooding, satellites and astronauts aboard the International Space Station were snapping away.

From space, the storm looked downright stunning, and many of the images help explain how it was that Baltimore and New York's JFK International Airport both set records for the largest snowstorm on record, while New York City came up just one-tenth of an inch shy of tying its all-time record of 26.9 inches.

Moonlit view

Here's an unusual view of the storm at night, using the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on the Suomi NPP satellite. It shows the storm at 2:15 a.m. ET on Jan. 23. The imager detects faint light signals, from city lights to moonlight.

Blizzard of 2016 seen from a polar orbiting satellite on Jan. 23, 2016. Image: NASA

Areas of intense thunderstorms forming over the relatively mild waters of the Gulf Stream are clearly visible, with convective snows moving northwestward, dumping heavy snow across the Mid-Atlantic at the time.

Snow cover visible from space

Here's a visible satellite look at the Washington, D.C., area on Sunday, showing the widespread snow cover:

Visible satellite image showing a snowbound Washington, D.C., area.

One characteristic of the storm, which caused forecasters days of hand-wringing, was the sharp northern cutoff to the snow. This image, taken on Jan. 23, shows exactly where the snow/no-snow line set up:

Those snowfall rates, tho

A recently added NASA satellite, known as the Global Precipitation Measurement satellite (GPM), captured a three-dimensional slice through the storm that shows both the heavy snow shield on the northern side of the system and areas of thunderstorms over the Northwest Atlantic.

NASA GPM view of the Blizzard of 2016.

One of the reasons this storm was such a prolific snowmaker was that it tapped into a rich source of tropical moisture, as shown by the animation included in this tweet — which shows areas of high and low amounts of moisture (a metric known as total precipitable water.)

Morphed Integrated Microwave Imagery capturing evolution of #blizzard2016 through total precipitable water, @UWCIMSS pic.twitter.com/RB623fwRee — Zack Labe (@ZLabe) January 24, 2016

This visible satellite image also shows the moisture feed going into this storm, which fed warm, moist air from the Bahamas and Atlantic Ocean northward, where it interacted with a cold air mass in ways that produced heavy snows.

Visible satellite image of the Blizzard of 2016 on Jan. 22, 2016. Image: NASA

ISS snapshots

Space Station astronaut Scott Kelly tweeted several images of the storm, including one showing lightning associated with the storm system. It's not clear, though, whether he was correct about it being thundersnow, or if that storm was over the open Atlantic, where rain was falling.