Artemis II: The Mission and Its Images

Artemis II launched on April 1, 2026, from Pad 39B at Kennedy Space Center aboard NASA’s Space Launch System. The crew — Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen — flew a 10-day lunar flyby test mission aboard the Orion capsule (named Integrity). The purpose was to test systems, identify problems, and validate hardware for future lunar landing missions. No landing was attempted.

Watching this mission unfold has been genuinely incredible. In a period where so much of the world is chaotic and uncertain, having something this ambitious and this beautiful to follow has been a welcome reminder of what humans are capable of when they’re pointed in the right direction. The images that came back are stunning, and I wanted to put all of my favorite ones in one place.

Dark-Side Earth Photography#

Some of the most striking images showed Earth’s night side after the spacecraft left low orbit. A thin crescent of sunlight and scattered city lights were visible, while the rest of the cloud cover was faintly illuminated by moonshine — sunlight reflecting off the full Moon back onto Earth.

Longer-exposure versions of these shots revealed additional features:

• Venus as a bright point of light
• Green auroras visible at high latitudes
• The sodium layer — a thin glowing ring around the planet at roughly 90 km altitude, created by atomic sodium deposited from vaporized meteors and excited by sunlight. Astronomers use lasers tuned to this sodium’s wavelength to create artificial “guide stars,” then measure atmospheric distortion to drive adaptive optics corrections on ground-based telescopes.
• Zodiacal light — a faint glow caused by sunlight scattering off interplanetary dust along the plane of the solar system

The Moon’s Far Side#

As the capsule orbited the Moon, it captured detailed views of the far side, which is heavily cratered compared to the smoother near side. The near side has a thinner crust, likely due to gravitational interaction and concentration of radioactive, heat-producing elements, which allowed more volcanic activity to resurface the terrain with lava flows. The far side, with its thicker crust, preserves a much longer history of impacts. Visible features include crater chains — linear strings of craters formed by ejecta from large impacts like the Orientale basin — and deep multi-ring impact basins.

”Earthset”#

The mission produced a now-iconic image of a crescent Earth appearing to set behind the Moon’s limb, shot with a long telephoto lens (80–400 mm on a Nikon D5). While visually stunning, the image contains three subtle distortions worth understanding:

1. Orientation — The photo has been rotated to make it look like Earth is rising or setting over a horizon. From the spacecraft’s actual trajectory, Earth was off to the side.
2. Apparent size — The telephoto lens compresses the scene, making Earth appear far larger relative to the lunar surface than it would to the naked eye.
3. The concept of Earthrise/Earthset — Because the Moon is tidally locked, Earth doesn’t actually rise or set from the lunar surface. From the near side, Earth hangs in roughly the same spot in the sky (with slight wobble from libration). From the far side, Earth is never visible. The apparent motion in these photos is entirely due to the spacecraft’s orbit.

The Moon’s surface in these shots also looks oddly “rendered” or video-game-like. This is because lighting in space comes from a single source (the Sun) with no atmospheric scattering to fill shadows, producing extreme contrast that our brains read as computer-generated.

The Unplanned Solar Eclipse#

The mission’s most dramatic visual moment was unplanned. Because of a launch schedule slip to April 1, the departing spacecraft’s geometry happened to align so that the Moon passed directly in front of the Sun. The astronauts watched from within the Moon’s shadow as the solar corona — hot plasma extending far from the Sun’s surface — formed a bright halo around the Moon’s silhouette.

The Moon’s dark side was faintly illuminated by Earthshine: sunlight bouncing off the distant Earth. Stars and several planets (including Mars, Venus, and Saturn) were visible along the plane of the solar system in the same frame. Victor Glover remarked from orbit that humans probably haven’t evolved to process what they were seeing.

Wide Compositions#

Several images placed the Orion capsule, the Moon, and the Earth all in a single frame — one captured by a GoPro mounted externally. These compositions drive home the scale contrast between the small, improvised nature of human spacecraft and the vastness of the space around them.

Why These Photos Matter#

The most powerful Artemis II images resulted from a combination of luck and deliberate human choices. The launch date created the eclipse geometry. The astronauts chose the compositions, lenses, and framing. Photographs from crewed missions are not just data — they are artistic decisions that shape how humanity processes and remembers spaceflight.

Gallery#

All 118 images and videos below are full-resolution NASA originals. Click any thumbnail to view it larger, and use the download button to save individual files or download the entire collection.