From the EXIF we can infer that every setting was left at the default. No exposure comp, no contrast, no HSL, no lens correction and a linear tone curve. Just the default Adobe Color profile at 5400K.
The Lightroom one was processed from raw. Also, by brightening it a lot, the noisy high-ISO grain becomes more apparent. Noise is famously incompressible, so it leads to a much larger file size.
The photograph appears to show nightime on Earth with just a sliver of daytime. Beyond cities in Iberia and along the coast of Africa, most of what we can see would be reflected light from the Moon? We are just past full moon on April 1.
1/4 exposure time so 250 ms of light. the light is coming from all the light sources in the universe, plus the moon, plus the sun's rays refracting through the atmosphere which happens even at night.
The natural blue light is coming from the oxygen in the atmosphere but it's so overwhelming in that spot that it turns the light pure white. The red/orangish is coming from particulates and the green/red from aurora. My favorite part I think is the very bottom where you can see the blue light taper off and not overwhelm the camera sensor and you can see the aurora with it. I love this photo so much.
Maybe it’s because I (like many) have experienced taking pictures at night and seeing the grainy result that _this_ image struck me as incredibly realistic.
Almost like I ran the grainy-to-real conversion in my mind and I felt like I was imagining seeing this in person. Beautiful image!
Yes, the D5s are the 'official' Handheld Universal Lunar Cameras (HULCs), but (a?) Z9 also got on-board at the 'last minute' (which means two years ago):
I'd have probably shot it wide open at f/2.8 rather than cranking the ISO up to 51200. Incredibly impressed at the steady hands for a sharp image at 1/4 s shutter speed though! Maybe they just let the camera float in space with the mirror up, triggering it remotely.
I would imagine since they are not circling the earth, that there will be pull of gravity and the camera would start to move relative to the spacecraft. But may not fast enough for a short exposure
The D5 doesn't have built in GPS, and adding it requires an attachment. I don't know if the smartphone app works on that model, but it is from the same year as my D5600 which does support it. The app provides GPS but also drains the battery fast. I turned airplane mode on after the first dead battery.
"The Nikon D5 remains the camera of choice for the Artemis II mission and will be assigned primary photographic duties. It is a proven, highly-tested camera that the Artemis II team knows will excel in the high-radiation environment of space. However, as Artemis II Commander Reid Wiseman explained ahead of yesterday’s launch, he successfully fought to have a single Nikon Z9 added to Artemis II’s manifest."
There are more interesting details in the PetaPixel article, such as: "'That’s the camera that they’ll be using, the crew will be using on Artemis III plus, so we were fighting really hard to get that on the vehicle to test out in a high-radiation environment in deep space,' Wiseman said."
H/t to "SiliconEagle73" who linked to that PetaPixel article in the thread linked below.
My only curiosity, and yeah I know orders of significance etc...
Buuuuut I wonder why they didn't consider a Z5[0][1] and the Z mount 14-24, or the Z5 with an adapter for the F mount 14-24....
There's at least a pound of weight savings on the table.
Specifically, I wonder if it's a fun reason? i.e. it would be interesting if there was a technical reason like 'IBIS fails miserbly' or 'increased sensor resolution adds too much noise' (even at that ISO you gave from the EXIF...)
[0] I'm really more of a Sony person but am thus keenly aware about importance of UX feel, so I tried to keep the question apples to apples here.
Edited to add:
[1] Per [0] I may be stupid in thinking the Z5 is a 'at least minimal' substitute so happy to learn something here.
I was confused when I first saw this photo, as I don't think I've ever before seen a nightside, moonlit Earth, exposed so that it looks like the dayside at a first glance. I wonder how many casual viewers actually realize it's the night side. A nice demonstration of how moonlight is pretty much exactly like sunlight, just much much dimmer. In particular it has the same color, even though moonlight is often thought of as bluish and sunlight as yellowish!
I've done several shoots lit only by the full moon. Doing long exposure, the images are as you stated not much different than an image taken during the day, except for looking at the sky and seeing stars.
I've also done video shoots with the newer mirrorless cameras and fast lenses shooting wide open again lit with nothing but the full moon. It again looks daylight on the image. As a bit of BTS, I recorded a video of the screen on the camera showing what it was seeing, and then pulled away and reframed to show essentially the same shot as the camera but it's just solid black. One of those videos was fun as we caught a bit of lens flaring from the moon, and you can actually see the details of the surface of the moon in the reflection. It was one of those things I just never considered before as flares coming from lights or the sun are just void of detail.
It explains why the image is so grainy. At first I was confused what that stripe to the left and the bottom was. But it’s just the window edge, and the noise isn’t stars.
(To be clear, the bright dots are stars [except the brightest one, in the lower right, is Venus I think], which makes this photo also a great demonstration that of course you can capture stars in space, you just have to expose properly!)
Who said you can't capture stars in space? What do you think the purpose of Hubble, JWST, etc are? There's also plenty of imagery taken from ISS that clearly show stars. I've definitely seen Orion in some of that imagery and it put a different perspective on the size of the constellations when seen from that angle.
I referred to the common question (or accusation) of why there are no stars in, say, the Apollo photos taken on the moon. The answer is, of course, that you can't see stars if you're exposing for something bright and sunlit, like the day side of Earth, or the lunar surface.
How do you know that they're stars? I believe they probably are stars as well (by visual comparison with a star chart, suitably rotated), but I've found no source for either claim.
I did find multiple sources, including TFA, for the brightest being Venus.
I’m talking about the grainy noise over all the black parts (actually over the Earth disk as well), including beyond the window edge. The window edge itself looks like a denser and brighter stripe of stars.
It’s a remarkable photo. You can see the aurora Australis at the top right of the image (it’s upside down, if there is such a thing - that’s the straits of Gibraltar at the lower left, and the Sahara above it - and the skein of atmosphere wrapping the entire planet. Those look like noctilucent clouds in the north, or possibly more aurora.
It really is gorgeous. You can see both auroral rings, then there's airglow, and city lights around Gibraltar and on the South American coast, and lightning flashes in the storm clouds over the tropics.
I wish I could see a pic from today with the aurora. I was surprised to see the aurora in northern Europe a couple hours ago, it is very active right now.
Yeah, it is - unfortunately, it is rather cloudy in my area at the moment. Luckily, the weather was better during the 19./20. January event, which I'll carry forever in my heart.
It is funny if you think about it, imagine you arrive on a planet and there is nothing there, now what. Not saying it is not worth doing but it's like other aspects of life, about the journey. But yeah I think we are lucky to have this ability/get outside of our sandbox. Be aware of the bigger picture.
It really is crazy when you think about it, we're capable of taking a picture of the planet we live on from outer space. We take it for granted, that we know what it all looks like. I often find myself wondering how ancient peoples before us would react to something like this
Yes, I was also confused when I first saw it – how could the aurora be visible?! The bright sliver of atmosphere in the lower right is, of course, backlit by the sun which is itself eclipsed by Earth. It's the near-full moon that provides most of the illumination here. Besides both auroral rings you can also see airglow, city lights, and lightning flashes, it's a marvellous photo.
Come on flat-earthers. I know you are out there. Lets hear your crazy rant about how this is a fisheye lens on a weather balloon or a webcam atop the eiffel tower. Why can't we see the poles? And is that an ice wall on poking up in the lower-right quadrant of the disk?
There is no point engaging in any way with people who believe in such "theories". They are like trolls, the only way to deal with them is not at all. Don't engage, don't disagree, just nothing, total silence. One can choose to be a wilful edit and waste your life and time on complete bullshit, but the rest of us should just ignore those people completely.
Ya, but eventually they all wind up wearing furs and carrying spears as they storm the gates of some government building. Its all good fun until people start to die. We laugh as soveriegn citizens are yanked from thier cars. Harder to watch are the vids of them pulling guns on police.
Conspiracy theorists need to be kept in check. Disengagment is easy but it doesnt help.
Flat Earth is a distraction or a way to ridicule any counter-narrative to anything scientific.
When a cosmologist says that a planet nobody can see exists and is made of x% helium and is y light years away etc etc with absolute certainty despite nobody being able to go there and witness any of it (look how wrong they were about Pluto’s appearance), then you can always just say “what are you a Flat Earther” and easily discredit any doubt I have in these extraordinary claims with underwhelming evidence.
Any idea you want the public to oppose, you can create and market an adjacent thing, like Trump. You can throw all the ideas you want to oppose in the Trump bucket and if anyone supports it it’s probably because they’re a Trump supporter right?
See you’re very very easily programmed, like clockwork.
I do not know what you mean about "how wrong they were about Pluto’s appearance".
Since when I was very young and until now the amount of information about Pluto has continuously increased, so now we know much more about it.
For example now we know that Pluto is practically a double planet, having a relatively very large satellite. This was not known when I was a child, e.g. at the time of the first NASA Moon missions.
However, I do not remember anything wrong. Many things that have been learned recently were previously unknown, not wrong.
If you refer to the fact that Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet, that is also a case of information previously unknown, not wrong.
This planetary reclassification was not the first.
When Ceres was discovered in 1801, it was considered the 7th planet, after the 5 planets known in antiquity and Uranus that was discovered a few years earlier. (The chemical elements uranium and cerium, which were discovered soon after the planets, were named so after the new planets, as their discovery impressed a lot the people of those times.)
However, soon after Ceres a great number of other bodies were discovered in the same region and it was understood that Ceres is not a single planet, but a member of the asteroid belt.
Exactly the same thing happened with Pluto, but because of its distance, more years have passed until a great number of bodies have been discovered beyond Neptune and it became understood that Pluto is just one of them, i.e. a member of the Kuiper belt, so it was reclassified, exactly like Ceres.
> ...discredit any doubt I have in these extraordinary claims with underwhelming evidence.
Something unfortunate about our media environment is that science news is a dumbed down summary of a dumbed down summary of a dumbed down summary. These issues you're flagging, a lack of evidence and overstated certainty - they're an artifact of the reporting process. If you work your way back to the original sources, there will be a heck of a lot of evidence and it will carry error bars (so the certainty is precisely & appropriately stated). There's bad or even fraudulent papers out there but there's a huge amount of good science being done by honest researchers who are just as concerned as you are about the quality of the evidence and the degree of certainty.
Eg, there really is a compelling explanation of how we can know the composition of a gas giant light-years away, and it isn't invented out of thin air, it's been 100+ year process of understanding spectroscopy and cosmology, building better telescopes, etc. It's the culmination of generations of scientists pushing the field forward millimeter by millimeter.
The only real difference between the "spaceflight" in the 1960's and today is that these pictures don't need to be hand painted - you can render them in Blender in a single day.
But yeah, sure. With the amount of fake stuff on the internet including AI image generation, we're expected to believe that the US government dumped billions of dollars into going to space when they could give the appearance of doing so for a few bucks in nano banana credits? Hah.
They couldn't do that for "a few bucks of nano banana credits" though. You could generate the imagery but that's only one line of evidence. A launch is easily detectable through multiple signals.
Why would Russia and China and any other country with any degree of astronomic capability that the US has an adversarial relationship with just let them get away with lying to the world? Why wouldn't they take the opportunity to humiliate the US by revealing that no launch happened and that they cannot detect the spacecraft?
How would they prove that no launch happened? There isn't conclusive evidence of an absence of launch, and if there were it would be accused as being fake and a ploy from American enemies to discredit them.
> There isn't conclusive evidence of an absence of launch, ...
A launch is detectable seismically, visually, on radar, etc. There's a lot of investment in being able to detect launches (to detect the launch of nuclear weapons). It would be screamingly obvious if the launch was fake. It would absolutely be conclusive if there were no seismic activity, no radar return, they couldn't detect the spacecraft presently, etc. At least for a definition of "conclusive" that can be operationalized - conclusiveness is a judgement call about when evidence is sufficient and not reaching some theoretical 100% certainty (which can't possibly be reached for any claim for the reason you outlined - you can always invent some negative counterclaim that can't be entirely dismissed, even for claims like "the sky is blue").
It's also pretty easy to find people who were physically there to witness the launch. This wasn't a secret bunker or a barge in the middle of the ocean. It was in Florida in the late afternoon.
> ...it would be accused as being fake and a ploy from American enemies to discredit them.
Hundreds of thousands of people around the world have access to this data. Astronomers, geologists, petroleum engineers, backyard amateurs. The conspirators could muddy the waters but they couldn't ultimately prevail. It is many orders of magnitude easier to go to the moon than to convincingly fake it.
Your comment history suggests you're in the US, so you should be pleased to learn that you weren't included. The visible landmass is northern Africa, with a smidge of the Iberian Peninsula visible.
Oh, good point. I missed South America under the cloud cover. I guess the Eastern edge of the US would indeed be visible as a highly distorted smudge on the edge of the visible surface.
Thank you. I have having trouble making sense of the orientation. My first thought was misshapen Australia, but where Spain nears Africa is much different than Australia and Tasmania. Also, they forgot New Zealand... while common for maps, I would expect it to show up in a photo.
I don't understand why media, such as BBC, keep uploading heavily compressed versions of photos that could be beautiful. The original has grain, sure but that's not a problem. The BBC version is horrific. Are they trying to save on bandwidth in 2026?
"I cannot immediately find a photo on a website, therefore I will denigrate the agency that sent people into OUTER SPACE to make these incredible images possible."
Looking at the EXIF (with exiftool) for the image uploaded by NASA (https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/art002e00019...), apparently this was taken by a Nikon D5 with an AF-S Zoom-Nikkor 14-24mm f/2.8G ED and developed with Lightroom. It also seems like very little was done in Lightroom. Amazing... I dumped the whole EXIF here: https://gist.github.com/umgefahren/a6f555e6588a98adb74eed79d...
Before Lightroom it might have looked closer to this: https://images-assets.nasa.gov/image/art002e000193/art002e00...
From the EXIF we can infer that every setting was left at the default. No exposure comp, no contrast, no HSL, no lens correction and a linear tone curve. Just the default Adobe Color profile at 5400K.
But that one (art002e000193~large.jpg) is only 287kB. The Lightroom-processed one is 6.2MB. I would expect original to be heavier.
The resolutions are different, 1920x1280 vs. 5568x3712.
Also possibly different JPEG quality settings.
The Lightroom one was processed from raw. Also, by brightening it a lot, the noisy high-ISO grain becomes more apparent. Noise is famously incompressible, so it leads to a much larger file size.
Brightening the image may make the iso noise easier to see, but it doesn't create it.
The photograph appears to show nightime on Earth with just a sliver of daytime. Beyond cities in Iberia and along the coast of Africa, most of what we can see would be reflected light from the Moon? We are just past full moon on April 1.
1/4 exposure time so 250 ms of light. the light is coming from all the light sources in the universe, plus the moon, plus the sun's rays refracting through the atmosphere which happens even at night.
The natural blue light is coming from the oxygen in the atmosphere but it's so overwhelming in that spot that it turns the light pure white. The red/orangish is coming from particulates and the green/red from aurora. My favorite part I think is the very bottom where you can see the blue light taper off and not overwhelm the camera sensor and you can see the aurora with it. I love this photo so much.
Probably my favorite photo ever now.
That's what the caption the article above says
Might I ask, what was your path to finding this image?
https://www.nasa.gov/gallery/journey-to-the-moon/
Thanks so much. Sending this link to my nerdy nephews immediately.
Maybe it’s because I (like many) have experienced taking pictures at night and seeing the grainy result that _this_ image struck me as incredibly realistic.
Almost like I ran the grainy-to-real conversion in my mind and I felt like I was imagining seeing this in person. Beautiful image!
Yes, the D5s are the 'official' Handheld Universal Lunar Cameras (HULCs), but (a?) Z9 also got on-board at the 'last minute' (which means two years ago):
* https://petapixel.com/2026/04/02/a-nikon-z9-made-it-aboard-t...
They have a thermal blanket for exterior work:
* https://petapixel.com/2026/02/24/artemis-ii-astronauts-will-...
* https://petapixel.com/2025/01/10/the-custom-nikon-z9-and-the...
* Various stories with the "Artemis" tag: https://petapixel.com/tag/artemis/
The D5 has been used on the ISS, including EVAs, since 2017, so they're a known quantity:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cameras_on_the_Interna...
The Mercury and Apollo missions used Hasselblad 500-series-based cameras (modified):
* https://www.hasselblad.com/about/history/hasselblad-in-space...
I'd have probably shot it wide open at f/2.8 rather than cranking the ISO up to 51200. Incredibly impressed at the steady hands for a sharp image at 1/4 s shutter speed though! Maybe they just let the camera float in space with the mirror up, triggering it remotely.
> I'd have probably shot it wide open at f/2.8 rather than cranking the ISO up to 51200.
One of the reasons the D5 supposedly was chosen was because of its high dynamic and good low light performance. It can go up to ISO 3,280,000:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikon_D5
The D5 has been used on the ISS, including EVAs, since 2017, so is a known quantity:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cameras_on_the_Interna...
You can get a D5 on amazon.com. It would be amazing if one of the astronauts did a review explaining how it performs in space.
I would imagine since they are not circling the earth, that there will be pull of gravity and the camera would start to move relative to the spacecraft. But may not fast enough for a short exposure
They're in space so they only sort of need to hold the camera.
Or maybe press the timer and let it float...
Nice. It would've been cool to see what the location information in the EXIF looked like, if it were there.
The D5 doesn't have built in GPS, and adding it requires an attachment. I don't know if the smartphone app works on that model, but it is from the same year as my D5600 which does support it. The app provides GPS but also drains the battery fast. I turned airplane mode on after the first dead battery.
GPS might work out there though: https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/somd/space-communications-...
While the D5 is a great camera it's ~10 years old. Wonder why they didn't go for the Z9 which is its modern mirrorless equivalent.
"The Nikon D5 remains the camera of choice for the Artemis II mission and will be assigned primary photographic duties. It is a proven, highly-tested camera that the Artemis II team knows will excel in the high-radiation environment of space. However, as Artemis II Commander Reid Wiseman explained ahead of yesterday’s launch, he successfully fought to have a single Nikon Z9 added to Artemis II’s manifest."
https://petapixel.com/2026/04/02/a-nikon-z9-made-it-aboard-t...
There are more interesting details in the PetaPixel article, such as: "'That’s the camera that they’ll be using, the crew will be using on Artemis III plus, so we were fighting really hard to get that on the vehicle to test out in a high-radiation environment in deep space,' Wiseman said."
H/t to "SiliconEagle73" who linked to that PetaPixel article in the thread linked below.
https://old.reddit.com/r/nasa/comments/1sbfevm/new_high_reso...
> Wonder why they didn't go for the Z9 which is its modern mirrorless equivalent.
From [0], "The D5 was chosen for its radiation resistance, extreme ISO range (up to 3,280,000), and proven reliability in space." (
[0] https://www.photoworkout.com/artemis-ii-nikon-d5-moon/
They did bring the Z9: https://petapixel.com/2026/04/02/a-nikon-z9-made-it-aboard-t...
But yeah the grainy photo of the Earth with the D5 at ISO 51200 shows the shortcomings of the ancient DSLR. Still, great shot.
Zero point in measuring camera sizes (or other sizes haha) when JWST is floating there.
Government budgets man…
...
My only curiosity, and yeah I know orders of significance etc...
Buuuuut I wonder why they didn't consider a Z5[0][1] and the Z mount 14-24, or the Z5 with an adapter for the F mount 14-24....
There's at least a pound of weight savings on the table.
Specifically, I wonder if it's a fun reason? i.e. it would be interesting if there was a technical reason like 'IBIS fails miserbly' or 'increased sensor resolution adds too much noise' (even at that ISO you gave from the EXIF...)
[0] I'm really more of a Sony person but am thus keenly aware about importance of UX feel, so I tried to keep the question apples to apples here.
Edited to add:
[1] Per [0] I may be stupid in thinking the Z5 is a 'at least minimal' substitute so happy to learn something here.
They have a Z9 on board for radiation testing, but the D5 is the primary body for imaging on this mission IIRC
The D5 has been used on the ISS since 2017, including EVAs:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cameras_on_the_Interna...
The ISS now (also?) has Z9s. So they're both generally known-quantities.
Yeah other folks gave better insight while I was writing my comment, oops...
When you're riding a rocket that weighs 3.5 million pounds...
Is that the Rocket or the Craft+Mission payload?
My understanding is it's on the order of 5-10 pounds of rocket juice to get one pound of something to LEO, thus the question.
250 ms f/4 ISO 512000 in case anyone was wondering. I wonder if they applied any denoise, it looks great for such high ISO
Any GPS data? I wonder if it would pick anything up. Altitude reading would be interesting!
https://exifinfo.org/detail/RjJtDLtCfS5kpq0fM2e7yA
Thanks! This was my first question.
I was confused when I first saw this photo, as I don't think I've ever before seen a nightside, moonlit Earth, exposed so that it looks like the dayside at a first glance. I wonder how many casual viewers actually realize it's the night side. A nice demonstration of how moonlight is pretty much exactly like sunlight, just much much dimmer. In particular it has the same color, even though moonlight is often thought of as bluish and sunlight as yellowish!
I've done several shoots lit only by the full moon. Doing long exposure, the images are as you stated not much different than an image taken during the day, except for looking at the sky and seeing stars.
I've also done video shoots with the newer mirrorless cameras and fast lenses shooting wide open again lit with nothing but the full moon. It again looks daylight on the image. As a bit of BTS, I recorded a video of the screen on the camera showing what it was seeing, and then pulled away and reframed to show essentially the same shot as the camera but it's just solid black. One of those videos was fun as we caught a bit of lens flaring from the moon, and you can actually see the details of the surface of the moon in the reflection. It was one of those things I just never considered before as flares coming from lights or the sun are just void of detail.
It explains why the image is so grainy. At first I was confused what that stripe to the left and the bottom was. But it’s just the window edge, and the noise isn’t stars.
(To be clear, the bright dots are stars [except the brightest one, in the lower right, is Venus I think], which makes this photo also a great demonstration that of course you can capture stars in space, you just have to expose properly!)
Who said you can't capture stars in space? What do you think the purpose of Hubble, JWST, etc are? There's also plenty of imagery taken from ISS that clearly show stars. I've definitely seen Orion in some of that imagery and it put a different perspective on the size of the constellations when seen from that angle.
I referred to the common question (or accusation) of why there are no stars in, say, the Apollo photos taken on the moon. The answer is, of course, that you can't see stars if you're exposing for something bright and sunlit, like the day side of Earth, or the lunar surface.
Photos from the moon landings don't have stars in them, because they are exposed for full daylight on the moon.
How do you know that they're stars? I believe they probably are stars as well (by visual comparison with a star chart, suitably rotated), but I've found no source for either claim.
I did find multiple sources, including TFA, for the brightest being Venus.
They're much brighter than the noise floor. Photographic noise doesn't really have such outliers.
Why would you think they are not stars? Not really sure the confusion on the matter. Are we leaning towards this being shot from a soundstage?
Just answered my own question to my satisfaction; they are stars.
The same specs, which match star charts, show up in two images taken a few moments apart at different exposures (links were given down-thread).
Well one of them is obviously Venus. How did you determine the others weren't stars?
I’m talking about the grainy noise over all the black parts (actually over the Earth disk as well), including beyond the window edge. The window edge itself looks like a denser and brighter stripe of stars.
Zoom into this higher-resolution version: https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/art002e00019...
Yep, that's definitely noise.
It’s a remarkable photo. You can see the aurora Australis at the top right of the image (it’s upside down, if there is such a thing - that’s the straits of Gibraltar at the lower left, and the Sahara above it - and the skein of atmosphere wrapping the entire planet. Those look like noctilucent clouds in the north, or possibly more aurora.
It really is gorgeous. You can see both auroral rings, then there's airglow, and city lights around Gibraltar and on the South American coast, and lightning flashes in the storm clouds over the tropics.
Moonlight is reflected sunlight.
Can we confirm the cloud patterns match weather data from the same time? Might be a good way to verify.
Much higher quality images are available on the NASA Image Library:
Dark Side of the Earth: https://www.nasa.gov/image-detail/amf-art002e000193/
Hello World: https://www.nasa.gov/image-detail/fd02_for-pao/
On images-assets.nasa.gov, we can find the 5567x3712 resolution versions of these pictures:
Dark Side of the Earth: https://images-assets.nasa.gov/image/art002e000193/art002e00...
Hello World: https://images-assets.nasa.gov/image/art002e000192/art002e00...
It disappoints me greatly they're not raw :(
I love the fact that you can see the aurora at both poles!
I wish I could see a pic from today with the aurora. I was surprised to see the aurora in northern Europe a couple hours ago, it is very active right now.
Yeah, it is - unfortunately, it is rather cloudy in my area at the moment. Luckily, the weather was better during the 19./20. January event, which I'll carry forever in my heart.
Why 'spectacular' the quotes
I'm sad not alive at a time like Cowboy Bebop oh well, this is a great pic, overview effect
That’s peak British journalism to have everything in quotes. I’m surprised they didn’t write “allegedly spectacular”.
If they're someone else's words, they'll put them in quotation marks. Seems perfectly reasonable to me.
Not really
> Artemis II crew take 'spectacular' image of Earth
It was described by someone else as spectacular - in this case NASA
> Artemis II crew take spectacular image of Earth
We the BBC certify that this image is officially spectacular
Not hugely important in this context. By more import, when the sentence is something like X 'commits warcrimes' against Y
They are quoting NASA.
[unexplained loss of data]
It is funny if you think about it, imagine you arrive on a planet and there is nothing there, now what. Not saying it is not worth doing but it's like other aspects of life, about the journey. But yeah I think we are lucky to have this ability/get outside of our sandbox. Be aware of the bigger picture.
This is exactly what I need for printing as 14x10 4x6 photos stitched together!
It really just is a blue marble floating in nothingness.
If you're confused what you're looking at, turn it upside down.
Man, this is truly awesome. I wonder if NASA's Don Pettit, u/astro_pettit [0] consults on all missions going forward. He really should.
He is "our people," as far as hacking astrophotography from space. [1]
[0] https://old.reddit.com/user/astro_pettit
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42701645
It really is crazy when you think about it, we're capable of taking a picture of the planet we live on from outer space. We take it for granted, that we know what it all looks like. I often find myself wondering how ancient peoples before us would react to something like this
wait why is it round?
The shot is from directly above the disc and the great turtle is hidden beneath it.
It's not really round, it's just a lens aberration.
How come the pictures have such bad quality ? Is it a bandwidth issue ? Or there are really constraints that are not so obvious ?
Because fundamentally it is a large object illuminated by sunlight.
No, it's BBC's compression of that image.
Look at the original: https://www.nasa.gov/image-detail/fd02_for-pao/
It's grainy, but the detail is terrific.
No GPS coordinates in the EXIF data. Would've been funny.
@dang, mods: maybe this should be the post's link. The image quality is much higher.
It's the night-side Earth, taken at a high ISO value to keep shutter speed fast to prevent blur.
Ok thank you, makes more sense, I thought it was the day-side
Yes, I was also confused when I first saw it – how could the aurora be visible?! The bright sliver of atmosphere in the lower right is, of course, backlit by the sun which is itself eclipsed by Earth. It's the near-full moon that provides most of the illumination here. Besides both auroral rings you can also see airglow, city lights, and lightning flashes, it's a marvellous photo.
> The image, titled Hello, World
A new hello.jpg?
What a gorgeous sight to behold!
this ought to put flat-earthers completely down. :)
Where's Antarctica?
It took me a while to orient myself on that picture, until I realized where Spain is... :)
whats different between this and all the other pics of earth from various space devices
I saw someone point out on reddit that this probably the first digital picture of the whole earth (well, 1 side of it) taken by a person
Apollo used film and it's been a long time since anyone has gone past LEO
Haven't any of the space probes taken such pictures as they left to wander through the solar system?
There something amazing about that. Thanks for pointing it out!
It’s taken by a human on the way to the moon.
This is the night side.
Taken by a different camera, from a different location, at a different time.
truly stunning picture
I love how all the public critique about not being able to see stars in nasa photos has resulted in better dynamic range photography and composition
just the lowest hanging fruit that had been a second class citizen to the marvel of having an extraterrestrial angle to begin with
Imagine that all our joys, problems and attachments are within that blue sphere
Hello again dot.
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. — Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994
Can't decide if this is "MOEAGARE ARUCHIMISU" moment or a "Transcending Time" moment.
Does there exist a camera that can zoom into a single person from this distance?
Nope, not today that can be easily brought in space. Plus the atmosphere interfering.
Relevant XKCD "what if?" [0] is relevant.
[0] - https://what-if.xkcd.com/32/
Come on flat-earthers. I know you are out there. Lets hear your crazy rant about how this is a fisheye lens on a weather balloon or a webcam atop the eiffel tower. Why can't we see the poles? And is that an ice wall on poking up in the lower-right quadrant of the disk?
"How to Talk to a Science Denier: Conversations with Flat Earthers, Climate Deniers, and Others Who Defy Reason"
https://www.amazon.ca/How-Talk-Science-Denier-Conversations/...
Ridicule them until they leave? Don't really feel like wasting my time on any more than that.
Exactly what Professor Dave does.
Don’t you see the reflection of the studio lighting in the middle?
of course they are sore losers
My guess is the answer is: We didn’t really launch Artemis. This is all CG.
> This is all CG.
Reminds me of the classic - It is true that Spielberg filmed the moon landings, but he was such a perfectionist that he wanted to shoot on location.
ahem, Kubrik
[delayed]
This was a fantastic YouTube video on flat earther beliefs from a few years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTfhYyTuT44
Spoiler - they mostly switched to QAnon instead.
Don't pay attention to "authorities," think for yourself.
- Feynman
There is no point engaging in any way with people who believe in such "theories". They are like trolls, the only way to deal with them is not at all. Don't engage, don't disagree, just nothing, total silence. One can choose to be a wilful edit and waste your life and time on complete bullshit, but the rest of us should just ignore those people completely.
Ya, but eventually they all wind up wearing furs and carrying spears as they storm the gates of some government building. Its all good fun until people start to die. We laugh as soveriegn citizens are yanked from thier cars. Harder to watch are the vids of them pulling guns on police.
Conspiracy theorists need to be kept in check. Disengagment is easy but it doesnt help.
> eventually they all wind up wearing furs and carrying spears as they storm the gates of some government building
Put them in jail. If it becomes a serious problem, execute them for trying to overthrow our government.
The problem isn’t these people existing, speaking or even orgabusing. It’s the broken system of incentives that flow from our idiotic pardon powers.
Oh, wait, in addition to their usual conspiracy theories, now they can also claim that this is AI-generated!
Flat Earth is a distraction or a way to ridicule any counter-narrative to anything scientific.
When a cosmologist says that a planet nobody can see exists and is made of x% helium and is y light years away etc etc with absolute certainty despite nobody being able to go there and witness any of it (look how wrong they were about Pluto’s appearance), then you can always just say “what are you a Flat Earther” and easily discredit any doubt I have in these extraordinary claims with underwhelming evidence.
Any idea you want the public to oppose, you can create and market an adjacent thing, like Trump. You can throw all the ideas you want to oppose in the Trump bucket and if anyone supports it it’s probably because they’re a Trump supporter right?
See you’re very very easily programmed, like clockwork.
> a planet nobody can see exists and is made of x% helium and is y light years away etc etc
Yeah, because this is high-school curriculum.
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/resources/lesson-plan/using-lig...
> with absolute certainty
It is taught that the scientific method provides evidence, not certainty, in middle school science curriculum.
I do not know what you mean about "how wrong they were about Pluto’s appearance".
Since when I was very young and until now the amount of information about Pluto has continuously increased, so now we know much more about it.
For example now we know that Pluto is practically a double planet, having a relatively very large satellite. This was not known when I was a child, e.g. at the time of the first NASA Moon missions.
However, I do not remember anything wrong. Many things that have been learned recently were previously unknown, not wrong.
If you refer to the fact that Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet, that is also a case of information previously unknown, not wrong.
This planetary reclassification was not the first.
When Ceres was discovered in 1801, it was considered the 7th planet, after the 5 planets known in antiquity and Uranus that was discovered a few years earlier. (The chemical elements uranium and cerium, which were discovered soon after the planets, were named so after the new planets, as their discovery impressed a lot the people of those times.)
However, soon after Ceres a great number of other bodies were discovered in the same region and it was understood that Ceres is not a single planet, but a member of the asteroid belt.
Exactly the same thing happened with Pluto, but because of its distance, more years have passed until a great number of bodies have been discovered beyond Neptune and it became understood that Pluto is just one of them, i.e. a member of the Kuiper belt, so it was reclassified, exactly like Ceres.
> ...discredit any doubt I have in these extraordinary claims with underwhelming evidence.
Something unfortunate about our media environment is that science news is a dumbed down summary of a dumbed down summary of a dumbed down summary. These issues you're flagging, a lack of evidence and overstated certainty - they're an artifact of the reporting process. If you work your way back to the original sources, there will be a heck of a lot of evidence and it will carry error bars (so the certainty is precisely & appropriately stated). There's bad or even fraudulent papers out there but there's a huge amount of good science being done by honest researchers who are just as concerned as you are about the quality of the evidence and the degree of certainty.
Eg, there really is a compelling explanation of how we can know the composition of a gas giant light-years away, and it isn't invented out of thin air, it's been 100+ year process of understanding spectroscopy and cosmology, building better telescopes, etc. It's the culmination of generations of scientists pushing the field forward millimeter by millimeter.
Your argument is against large generalizations and straw man arguments, and to prove it, you.. use a generalization and straw man argument?
Do you believe in Antarctica?
The only real difference between the "spaceflight" in the 1960's and today is that these pictures don't need to be hand painted - you can render them in Blender in a single day.
But yeah, sure. With the amount of fake stuff on the internet including AI image generation, we're expected to believe that the US government dumped billions of dollars into going to space when they could give the appearance of doing so for a few bucks in nano banana credits? Hah.
Im curious, so the rocket definitely took off, where did it go?
They couldn't do that for "a few bucks of nano banana credits" though. You could generate the imagery but that's only one line of evidence. A launch is easily detectable through multiple signals.
Why would Russia and China and any other country with any degree of astronomic capability that the US has an adversarial relationship with just let them get away with lying to the world? Why wouldn't they take the opportunity to humiliate the US by revealing that no launch happened and that they cannot detect the spacecraft?
How would they prove that no launch happened? There isn't conclusive evidence of an absence of launch, and if there were it would be accused as being fake and a ploy from American enemies to discredit them.
> There isn't conclusive evidence of an absence of launch, ...
A launch is detectable seismically, visually, on radar, etc. There's a lot of investment in being able to detect launches (to detect the launch of nuclear weapons). It would be screamingly obvious if the launch was fake. It would absolutely be conclusive if there were no seismic activity, no radar return, they couldn't detect the spacecraft presently, etc. At least for a definition of "conclusive" that can be operationalized - conclusiveness is a judgement call about when evidence is sufficient and not reaching some theoretical 100% certainty (which can't possibly be reached for any claim for the reason you outlined - you can always invent some negative counterclaim that can't be entirely dismissed, even for claims like "the sky is blue").
It's also pretty easy to find people who were physically there to witness the launch. This wasn't a secret bunker or a barge in the middle of the ocean. It was in Florida in the late afternoon.
> ...it would be accused as being fake and a ploy from American enemies to discredit them.
Hundreds of thousands of people around the world have access to this data. Astronomers, geologists, petroleum engineers, backyard amateurs. The conspirators could muddy the waters but they couldn't ultimately prevail. It is many orders of magnitude easier to go to the moon than to convincingly fake it.
I object to being included in this image without a model release and demand that pixel be removed.
Your comment history suggests you're in the US, so you should be pleased to learn that you weren't included. The visible landmass is northern Africa, with a smidge of the Iberian Peninsula visible.
South America is visible on the right, and it looks to me like part of North America might also be pictured close to the horizon.
Higher-resolution image: https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/art002e00019...
Oh, good point. I missed South America under the cloud cover. I guess the Eastern edge of the US would indeed be visible as a highly distorted smudge on the edge of the visible surface.
For a view of roughly the same half of Earth, but with less clouds, if you rotate the image clockwise by 150 degrees you get roughly this viewpoint of the earth: https://earth.google.com/web/@3.63731074,-23.1618975,-2690.7...
Thanks!
There's a heading control to include rotation in link: https://earth.google.com/web/@3.63731074,-23.1618975,-2690.7...
Thank you. I have having trouble making sense of the orientation. My first thought was misshapen Australia, but where Spain nears Africa is much different than Australia and Tasmania. Also, they forgot New Zealand... while common for maps, I would expect it to show up in a photo.
If they somehow manage to get another photo which features Australia without New Zealand that would be the best Apr 1st joke I've ever seen
Thanks I was looking for an orientation comment.
Classic American thinking even from space they are the center of the world smdh
Tell the world you're REALLY fat without telling the world ...
"Your mom is so fat she would take a whole pixel on that image"?
Now I'm wondering about how many people per pixel?
Bad news, I was across town and I do consent to my pixel being used, so you're outta luck
Anyone find the full res version of this ?
Nasa images page is useless. Government work.
They're here: https://www.nasa.gov/gallery/journey-to-the-moon/
Direct link to this image: https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/art002e00019...
That version is ~~brightened significantly~~ (edit) a longer exposure; I like the darker one better.
https://www.nasa.gov/image-detail/amf-art002e000193/
They're two separate photos, just taken at different exposure settings.
Sure enough, thanks for the correction!
I don't understand why media, such as BBC, keep uploading heavily compressed versions of photos that could be beautiful. The original has grain, sure but that's not a problem. The BBC version is horrific. Are they trying to save on bandwidth in 2026?
"I cannot immediately find a photo on a website, therefore I will denigrate the agency that sent people into OUTER SPACE to make these incredible images possible."
Faking a trip to the moon does call for some fake imagery, otherwise why even bother?
It sure does. But this trip is real. As was Apollo.