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 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!
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
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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!
GPS might work out there though: https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/somd/space-communications-...
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.
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...
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/
But yeah the grainy photo of the Earth with the D5 at ISO 51200 shows the shortcomings of the ancient DSLR. Still, great shot.
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.
I did find multiple sources, including TFA, for the brightest being Venus.
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).
Zoom into this higher-resolution version: https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/art002e00019...
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...
I'm sad not alive at a time like Cowboy Bebop oh well, this is a great pic, overview effect
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
Because fundamentally it is a large object illuminated by sunlight.
Look at the original: https://www.nasa.gov/image-detail/fd02_for-pao/
It's grainy, but the detail is terrific.
A new hello.jpg?
Apollo used film and it's been a long time since anyone has gone past LEO
just the lowest hanging fruit that had been a second class citizen to the marvel of having an extraterrestrial angle to begin with
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. — Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994
[0] - https://what-if.xkcd.com/32/
https://www.amazon.ca/How-Talk-Science-Denier-Conversations/...
Spoiler - they mostly switched to QAnon instead.
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.
Conspiracy theorists need to be kept in check. Disengagment is easy but it doesnt help.
- Feynman
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Higher-resolution image: https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/art002e00019...
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...
There's a heading control to include rotation in link: https://earth.google.com/web/@3.63731074,-23.1618975,-2690.7...
Nasa images page is useless. Government work.
Direct link to this image: https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/art002e00019...
https://www.nasa.gov/image-detail/amf-art002e000193/