alt Hacker NewsArtemis II crew take “spectacular” image of Earth
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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!
Much higher quality images are available on the NASA Image Library:
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...
https://www.reddit.com/r/3DS/comments/1sakb3v/artemis_ii_lau...
The launch, shot on a Nintendo 3DS.
For those with a gen z-like retro tech streak.
I was trying to figure the country - I think north Africa upside down and Spain https://earth.google.com/web/@3.88879526,-24.75819914,62.068...
For anyone not understanding the high ISO please have a look at this recent video by minutephysics.
Do you understand ISO?
It took me 21 years...
This video explains how ISO is very different to what most people imagine, and how you can use this knowledge to take less noisy photos.
There's something a bit weird having these digital photos and crisp digital audio and video of the astronauts, and seeing pictures of mission control with flat screens after having grown up on grainy analogue video, crackly audio with lots of beeps, and mission control being choc full of CRTs being watch by men in short sleeve shirts with black ties and cigarettes.
Pale Blue Dot subtly shaped my perception of Earth.
We are not standing on earth looking up at the stars.
We are being held by earth as we look down into an infinite abyss of death.
Everything we are depends on that fragile bubble holding us.
I love the fact that you can see the aurora at both poles!
Why 'spectacular' the quotes
I'm sad not alive at a time like Cowboy Bebop oh well, this is a great pic, overview effect
It's humbling to see this image. I can't even begin to imagine what it must feel like to see this from the perspective of those astronauts.
If you are interested in taking similar images, there are several satellites transmitting ‘full disk’ images like this, instead of a camera you need a dish or yagi a sdr and lna. Example satellites are Himawari 8, GOES 18, Fengyun 2H.
This is all we've got. We need to do a better job of preserving it.
Fun question: What time was this taken?
The exif includes time, but not time zone. They are not quite at the moon, and Lunar Time is under active development but not official. Also clocks tick slower under the moon's weaker gravity. (Or is it faster?)
Anyway, what time was this taken?
It's kind of wild how every generation gets its own "Blue Marble" moment. Technically we've seen Earth from space a million times by now, but every new human perspective still hits differently
Unsurprisingly this is also today's Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD)
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
"It is the first time since 1972 that humans have travelled outside of the Earth's orbit." But they're not tho (Earth's gravitational dominance extends 4x the distance to the moon)
It really just is a blue marble floating in nothingness.
Dear some very-rich person, please send a selfie-camera to the space! Yes, all that effort so we can keep looking at ourselves on a planet scale.
How are people still flat-earthers after stuff like this
Why is spectacular in quotations? I keep seeing this in headlines, is it because they're quoting a single word?
Comparing the final two images of taken of earth in 1972 and 2026 respectively; does the 2026 (left) image look murkier and less crisp to anyone else?
Surely our camera gear is exponentially better now? Is the reason for the new image being ‘murkier’ due to light, pollution or something else?
Very cool. Along the same lines the EPIC::DSCOVR mission has been taking photos of the earth since, I believe, around 2015.
What is that bright star like object on the bottom right? Is it Venus? I’m guessing it’s Venus because it’s much brighter than a star would be.
> The image, titled Hello, World
A new hello.jpg?
This picture wasn't taken from far away, but I thought about that quote from Carl Sagan -
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
If you're confused what you're looking at, turn it upside down.
Why is the old image so much more blue? Did pollution increase cause this change in color over time?
The comparison pictures look like there is more dust in the air today. They don't explain this effect, so I assume it is related to time of day the photo was taken, or camera settings, not actual dust accumulation compared to 1972. However, the direct comparison gives the impression they want people to interpret like the air is getting dirtier?
to quote the old meme:
> hey, i'm in a picture with all my friends!
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.
Man, this is truly awesome. I wonder if NASA's Don Pettit, u/astro_pettit [0] consults on all missions going forward. He really should.
He is "our people," as far as hacking astrophotography from space. [1]
But why not film everything like skydivers do in 8K 120fps from every angle and live stream it? After all, it is 2026...and near-Earth missions like the Moon can now support hundreds of Mbps (even approaching Gbps with laser communication). In the age of live streaming, wasn't this taken into account? All we got is a choppy 480p video feed, if that.
To paraphrase Carl Sagan: insignificant plant in an insignificant galaxy and there’s a good chance we’ll annihilate ourselves.
Why didn't NASA or the news agencies rotate the image so North is up? and slightly to the right. That would make Africa instantly recognizable as that's how maps are imprinted in our brains.
There is no "up" in space, so that wouldn't be editing the image I feel. The camera just happened to be oriented "upside down".
What a gorgeous sight to behold!
here the original NASA photos at high resolution without unnecessary ads.
It took me a while to orient myself on that picture, until I realized where Spain is... :)
This is exactly what I need for printing as 14x10 4x6 photos stitched together!
1D smol brains: "Fckin flat erthers lolll"
2D midbrains: "It's Africa and Spain, I can tell you because of my superior knowledge of geography! Are you impressed yet"
3D minds of men: "Godspeed you brave soldiers"
4D Galaxy brains: "Israel did 911, all this space shit is a front for making bombs and rockets, nobody knows where we came from or what happens when we die"
Gotta love the sarcastic quotes
the pale blue dot.
if anything in life gives me pleasure is I have experienced life, with its highs and downs on this little speck.
I love how all the public critique about not being able to see stars in nasa photos has resulted in better dynamic range photography and composition
just the lowest hanging fruit that had been a second class citizen to the marvel of having an extraterrestrial angle to begin with
Did they mount my Canon 7D to the outside? :D reminds me of the familiar grain haha
Where are the turtles?
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...