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...

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

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.

The EXIF data says that the picture was taken with the flash off!

How did they get the Earth to light up when it is obviously dark outside? Is this fake?

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

Almost 6 decades later, Omega still has a firm hold on NASA by the wrist. https://www.gearpatrol.com/watches/omega-speedmaster-artemis...

It's fun to think about tile dilation per the exif captured Create Date: "2026:04:03 00:27:39.26". I know it's negligible over the trip, but when they took it, was their time really "2026:04:03 00:27:39.25"?

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.

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

Wild. I saw a quick glance and assumed the Z9 but the D5 is near the peak of the DSLR world so I guess.

The ISO 51200 would certainly explain the grain when viewing the image at 1:1 scale.

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.

It also seems like very little was done in Lightroom.

This is consistent with good photographic technique that prioritizes "getting it right in the camera."

...

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'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.

Thanks. Until you pointed out it's Earth at night, I had no clue what was supposed to be special about this photo (it appeared suspiciously pixelated for something 'high res', and neighbouring pixels seemed to contrast in colour rather than smoothly complementing as most photos do - but I guess that's random patches of city lights being captured by the camera). Cool stuff!

Something I haven't figured out is: what is that yellow/whitish smudge toward the center of the earth? It looks like camera glare or a reflection?

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.

What does it look like to human eyes? Is there enough light for a person up there to see colour, or would it look like black and white (like a moonlit scene on the ground).

The camera is compensating for extremely low light, so you end up with something that looks closer to a daylight exposure

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.

Same! I mean the last time we were in space the cameras were ... not this good. I can't wait to see more photos from modern hardware!

> even though moonlight is often thought of as bluish and sunlight as yellowish!

Is that... true? Sunlight is seen as yellow, of course, but the moon is usually thought of as white.

Moonlight is reflected sunlight.

It disappoints me greatly they're not raw :(

What a mad idea.

The aesthetic ended up pretty cool but I can’t imagine the thought process that lead to capturing the launch on a 3DS.

It's one of those stark reminders that there's no such thing as up or down in space, and something that disabuses me of the notion that I can truly comprehend "the enemy gate is down".

I get that feeling, but I think a lot of the "texture" we remember is really just the limitations of the tech at the time

I had a similar thought at first, and then remembered the steady technical progress of the Shuttle era (at least from my recollection).

I may be mistaken but there's even atmosphere visible - that tiny translucent band on the darker photo

It almost looks like the Earth has a subtle glow around it

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.

I like the non brightened version, where you can clearly see the light coming from cities. How cool would it be if we saw similar on another planet...

They are quoting NASA.

[unexplained loss of data]

And they can be found online pretty easily: https://himawari8.nict.go.jp/.

I remember there's some tools to use the images as desktop backgrounds: https://github.com/boramalper/himawaripy

I remember watching grainy B+W ones in the 80s via a dish. It might have been a slow scan signal back then? It blew my mind watching the Earth live as a disk, seeing the weather in realtime.

    > We need to do a better job of preserving it.

Finally: Yes, global warming is real, but the threat is different. I predict that we will far exceed the average increase in global average temperature, but we will survive. Yes, we will survive, but with some "scars".

Unfortunately that would affect shareholder value.

One of the objectives of the Artemis missions is to prepare for Mars travel, none of the objectives of Artemis are to view Earth as the only planet we have nor to preserve it.

I think the clocks on board Orion are set to Houston time, which would be 5 hours behind UTC (because of Daylight Saving). But I'm not sure. I would expect the EXIF time to be in whatever time zone the spacecraft's clocks are set to.

> clocks tick slower under the moon's weaker gravity. (Or is it faster?)

Compared to clocks at rest on Earth, clocks on board Orion right now are ticking faster, because it's at a high enough altitude above the Earth that the faster ticking due to higher altitude outweighs the slower ticking due to speed relative to the Earth.

That will be true for most of the mission. For clocks in orbit about the Earth, the "breakeven point" where the altitude effect and the speed effect cancel out and the clock ticks at the same rate as an Earth clock is at, IIRC, about 1.5 Earth radii. So clocks on the ISS, for example, tick slower than Earth clocks; but clocks on the GPS satellites (orbiting at 4.2 Earth radii) tick faster (and there is an adjustment made for this on each satellite so that the time signals they send out match Earth clock rates).

For a spacecraft moving at escape velocity, which is going to be roughly true for Orion all the way until splashdown, I think the "breakeven point" is higher, at a little over 2 Earth radii. Orion will reach that point on the way back a few hours before splashdown, I think.

The Moon's gravity well is too shallow to make an appreciable difference in any of these calculations.

I should emphasize that all these tick rate effects are tiny, on the order of one part in a billion to one part in a hundred billion. Even when you add up the difference over the entire mission, it's still only on the order of hundreds of microseconds (i.e., the astronauts end up aging a few hundred microseconds more than people who stayed on Earth).

Line 30 of the exif dump in the gist linked above gives an offset of -05:00

Especially if they knew the sad state of the world whence the rocket was fired from, almost as a distraction of the decay of modern society mankind faces because of their fancy tech and the madmen it enables. I used to be fan of all space tech related stuff, but to me it has lost a lot of its shine. The people of old may say "hey, it is just like Easter island, except their monuments are dedicated to the God of Tech".

> It is the first time since 1972 that humans have travelled outside of the Earth's orbit.

They mean outside of low Earth orbit (which basically means further away than the ISS). The phrasing is not ideal.

> Earth's gravitational dominance extends 4x the distance to the moon

"Earth's gravitational dominance" is not a single thing; it depends on what kind of "dominance" you're talking about.

For example, even though the Moon is usually described as being in orbit about the Earth, its orbit is always concave towards the Sun. In other words, its net gravitational acceleration is always towards the Sun--even when the Earth is on the other side of it from the Sun. So by this criterion it's not in orbit about the Earth, it's in orbit about the Sun, doing a complicated do-si-do with the Earth, also in orbit about the Sun.

I'm not sure what definition of "dominance" you're using that extends the Earth's "dominance" to 4 times the distance of the Moon.

Technically correct, the best kind of correct. After all, the moon is in Earth's orbit.

Theyre travelling to a region of space where the moons gravity is more important than the earths though. I think that counts

It sounds trivial, but perspective shots like this are part of why public support for space programs exists at all

Good news! We already have that! If you pay taxes to the US that's one of the thing you've helped pay for:

https://www.nesdis.noaa.gov/imagery/satellite-maps

For reasons that are unexplainable if you're the NYTimes, polluting industries have been trying to kill these missions for decades.

Because without the network effect of adequate education, scientific understanding doesn't scale.

What does scale, unfortunately, is arrant nonsense.

I'm pretty sure people claim to be flat-earthers as a lark.

They aren't, what you see is a combination of trolls and propagandists; very few real human beings actually believe in such things.

You can't claim to have superior knowledge if you admit you're wrong.

Maybe I'm just a dumb optimist, but I've always assumed that the flat earthers started out as an enteraining debate club intentionally trying to prove something impossible just for the challenge, which got overtaken by a tiny number of vocal idiots. I have heard they largely have moved on to Qanon, which tracks.

This photo could be easily faked. I don't believe the Earth is flat, but I also don't think everybody on the planet should be 100% on one side of a discussion. Even if flat-earthers are kinda dumb, I think it's worse to force everyone into intellectual submission just because you're "right".

It’s a BBC journalistic standards thing; the BBC doesn’t want to express an opinion about the image, they are relaying that as a quote from someone about the image. The word “spectacular” is attributed to NASA in the article.

Yes

It's lazy "editorializing"

> Surely our camera gear is exponentially better now

They are better, but not exponentially. You can't beat physics, film cameras can still compete in terms of dynamic range and resolution, the optical elements haven't changed that much. The 1972 photo was taken on medium format film, which is twice the size of the sensor area in the modern one, which means more photons and less noise. The recent image was take at a really high ISO, which adds to the noisiness.

1972 -> taken during daytime 2026 -> taken during nightime

NASA confirmed it is Venus, yeah.

From the article:

> The Earth appears upside down

Which I find to be a rather interesting take.

West Africa & Gibraltar strait

One was taken during daylight on film, which needs to be processed and scanned, the other one was taken at high ISO during night time on a digital camera.

So much interpretation is done on colour on each step of the way that it's not surprising the colours are looking different.

https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/hello-world/

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.

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

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.

I was thinking the same thing, but then I decided to embrace the frustration of the image. It's reminding us that the pictures we have in our heads are kind of fragile. They don't prepare us for a live encounter with Earth from some random angle in space.

I personally prefer to view it in the same orientation the photographer saw it in their viewfinder. Makes me feel more like I’m inside the vessle looking at the planet.

If you live in the southern hemisphere most pictures of the Moon that you see online look upside down compared to ones that you take yourself.

I asked a different question in my mind, who says it "appears to us as upside down"? I would think if you lived in Patagonia, the south pole is "up".

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

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.

Just behind the horizon somewhere on the top right, or maybe some of those clouds are already it.

You can see for yourself in Google Maps if you enable the globe view, unfortunately it seems I can't share a direct link.

Can I see the thin band of atmosphere?

If you had routine space travel, you would be upset that you can't time travel.

Nope, not today that can be easily brought in space. Plus the atmosphere interfering.

What clearance level do you have?

Relevant XKCD "what if?" [0] is relevant.

[0] - https://what-if.xkcd.com/32/

Verify what?

No, that part of NASA was defunded.

"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/...

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Don't pay attention to "authorities," think for yourself.

- Feynman

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.

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.

Tell the world you're REALLY fat without telling the world ...

Bad news, I was across town and I do consent to my pixel being used, so you're outta luck

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...

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."