Discussion

Artemis II crew take 'spectacular' image of Earth

sandworm101: 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?

Sharlin: 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 a dayside at a first glance. I wonder how many casual viewers actually realize it's the night side.

damnitbuilds: Anyone find the full res version of this ?Nasa images page is useless. Government work.

matteason: 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...

mbauman: That version is brightened significantly; I like the darker one better.https://www.nasa.gov/image-detail/amf-art002e000193/

layer8: Don’t you see the reflection of the studio lighting in the middle?

geldedus: of course they are sore losers

hmaxwell: wait why is it round?

falcor84: It's not really round, it's just a lens aberration.

delichon: The shot is from directly above the disc and the great turtle is hidden beneath it.

slopinthebag: 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.

YZF: "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/...

delichon: I object to being included in this image without a model release and demand that pixel be removed.

rvnx: 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.

Sharlin: It's the night-side Earth, taken at a high ISO value to keep shutter speed fast to prevent blur.

rvnx: Ok thank you, makes more sense, I thought it was the day-side

Sharlin: Yes, I was also confused when I first saw it – how could the aurora be visible?! And 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. You can also see city lights and lightning flashes, it's a gorgeous photo really.

layer8: 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.

MarkusQ: Well one of them is obviously Venus. How did you determine the others weren't stars?

Sharlin: They're two separate photos, just taken at different exposure settings.

madaxe_again: 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.

Sharlin: (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!)

layer8: 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...

dylan604: 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.

MarkusQ: 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.

Sharlin: They're much brighter than the noise floor. Photographic noise doesn't really have such outliers.

the_humblest: Don't pay attention to "authorities," think for yourself. - Feynman

sgt: 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.

sgt: 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?

dylan604: 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.

Sharlin: 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.

smallerize: Photos from the moon landings don't have stars in them, because they are exposed for full daylight on the moon.

seydor: whats different between this and all the other pics of earth from various space devices

christophilus: My guess is the answer is: We didn’t really launch Artemis. This is all CG.

NitpickLawyer: > 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.

dylan604: ahem, Kubrik

brendoelfrendo: Ridicule them until they leave? Don't really feel like wasting my time on any more than that.

maxbond: 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?

Strom: Taken by a different camera, from a different location, at a different time.

AndroTux: No GPS coordinates in the EXIF data. Would've been funny.

ge96: Why 'spectacular' the quotesI'm sad not alive at a time like Cowboy Bebop oh well, this is a great pic, overview effect

consumer451: @dang, mods: maybe this should be the post's link. The image quality is much higher.

jgrahamc: 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.

sandworm101: 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.

hannesfur: 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...

pants2: 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.

jimbosis: "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...

gaurangt: Oh, wait, in addition to their usual conspiracy theories, now they can also claim that this is AI-generated!

brcmthrowaway: Does there exist a camera that can zoom into a single person from this distance?

delecti: 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.

layer8: 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...

delecti: 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...

mtone: Thanks!There's a heading control to include rotation in link: https://earth.google.com/web/@3.63731074,-23.1618975,-2690.7...

loloquwowndueo: Zero point in measuring camera sizes (or other sizes haha) when JWST is floating there.

HanClinto: Relevant XKCD "what if?" [0] is relevant.[0] - https://what-if.xkcd.com/32/

atentaten: Nice. It would've been cool to see what the location information in the EXIF looked like, if it were there.

layer8: Before Lightroom it might have looked closer to this: https://images-assets.nasa.gov/image/art002e000193/art002e00...

consumer451: Might I ask, what was your path to finding this image?

rafram: https://www.nasa.gov/gallery/journey-to-the-moon/

the_humblest: Faking a trip to the moon does call for some fake imagery, otherwise why even bother?

mememememememo: It sure does. But this trip is real. As was Apollo.

juleiie: I prefer to believe you will be able to experience spaceflight in 30 yearsI have nothing to lose in having such hope and it is a beautiful thought. Lots of people dedicated whole life to try to make it happen.I believe in a convergence of several technologies in the next couple of decades.

ranie93: 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!

Kye: 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-...

susam: Much better quality images are available on NASA Image Library.First, the NASA pages linking to these images:https://www.nasa.gov/image-detail/fd02_for-pao/https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/hello-world/Both articles link to this 5568x3712 image:https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/art002e00019...If we dig deeper into the image assets server, then we find these:https://images-assets.nasa.gov/image/art002e000193/art002e00...https://images-assets.nasa.gov/image/art002e000192/art002e00...

underlipton: Can't decide if this is "MOEAGARE ARUCHIMISU" moment or a "Transcending Time" moment.