NASA’s Artemis 2 astronauts are sharing perspectives of Earth that haven’t been seen by human eyes for more than 50 years — from a spaceship that’s traveling from our home planet to the moon.
Two days after the launch of the crew’s Orion space capsule, the first high-resolution photos looking back at Earth are hitting NASA’s image repository. “You guys look great,” astronaut Christina Koch said.
Today’s star of the show is a blue-marble photo captured by mission commander Reid Wiseman after Orion completed its translunar injection burn and headed outward from Earth orbit on April 2. The faint greenish glint of auroras can be seen at upper right and lower left. The brighter glow of zodiacal light is visible at lower right.
“You could see the entire globe, from pole to pole,” Wiseman said during a news briefing. “You could see Africa, Europe, and if you looked really close, you could see the northern lights. It was the most spectacular moment, and it paused all four of us in our tracks.”
Katie Mack, a cosmologist at the Perimeter Institute, pointed out on Bluesky that the full-disk photo is a night view illuminated by moonlight. “You can see city lights in Spain and Portugal, and a sliver of day at lower right,” she said. “The sun is entirely behind Earth, which makes it a kind of solar eclipse, but with Earth doing the eclipsing instead of the moon.”
The Weather Network’s Scott Sutherland labeled several of the photo’s remarkable features in a post to Threads. A more detailed star map shared on Bluesky by planetary scientist Michael Radke indicates that the bright spot at lower right is Venus.
Another photo shows a sidelong sliver of Earth, as seen through one of Orion’s four main windows. During their off-duty hours, the astronauts have been spending so much time checking out the view that Wiseman had to ask Mission Control for advice on removing smudges from the windows. (The solution? Water and dry wipes.)
This view of Earth was taken by NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman from one of the Orion spacecraft’s windows on April 2. Click on the image for a larger version. (NASA Photo)
Wiseman sent along two more pictures of Earth’s disk. One shows a darker night view with city lights in Europe, Africa and South America standing out more prominently. The other photo shows the terminator line between night and day, running down the center of the image:
This photo of a backlit Earth was taken by astronaut Reid Wiseman from one of the Orion spacecraft’s windows on April 2. Click on the image for a larger version. (NASA Photo)
The terminator line between day and night runs down the middle of this photo of Earth, captured by NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman. Click on the image for a larger version. (NASA Photo)
Yet another high-resolution view, showing a crescent Earth, was captured from the exterior of the spacecraft by an optical navigation sensor on the first day of the Artemis 2 mission and released today:
This black-and-white image of Earth was captured by the optical navigation sensor on the exterior of the Orion spacecraft on April 1. Click on the image for a larger version. (NASA Photo)
The images call to mind the views of Earth that Apollo astronauts captured during missions to the moon between 1968 and 1972. The “Earthrise” photo from Apollo 8 is arguably the best-known image from that era, but every Apollo mission featured glimpses of the home planet. It’s thought that the experience of seeing Earth’s full disk, surrounded by the blackness of space, can foster an intense appreciation of the planet’s fragility and the need to protect it — a phenomenon known as the Overview Effect.
It may not even be necessary to go to the moon to feel the Overview Effect. When Star Trek actor William Shatner took a suborbital space trip on Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket ship in 2021, he came back to Earth with tears in his eyes. “I’m so filled with emotion about what just happened,” he said. “I hope I never recover from this.”
Over the next few days, the four astronauts of the Artemis 2 crew — Wiseman, Koch, Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen and NASA pilot Victor Glover — will be practicing the picture-taking procedures that will come into play when Orion makes its slingshot flyby around the moon on April 6. That’ll mark the start of their return trip, with our home planet looming ever-larger through the (hopefully smudge-free) windows. So, stay tuned for more thrilling imagery from the first crewed mission to the moon and back since 1972.
Check back with Cosmic Log for daily updates about Artemis 2. Hat tip to Daniel Fischer for helping with the identification of Venus in the full-Earth photo.
