My only curiosity, and yeah I know orders of significance etc...
Buuuuut I wonder why they didn't consider a Z5[0] 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.
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.
consumer451 3 minutes ago [-]
Might I ask, what was your path to finding this image?
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.
jimbosis 5 minutes ago [-]
"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.
Zero point in measuring camera sizes (or other sizes haha) when JWST is floating there.
reactordev 12 minutes ago [-]
Government budgets man…
consumer451 22 minutes ago [-]
Thanks! This was my first question.
Sharlin 1 hours ago [-]
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!
dylan604 46 minutes ago [-]
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.
layer8 1 hours ago [-]
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.
Sharlin 59 minutes ago [-]
(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!)
dylan604 43 minutes ago [-]
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.
Sharlin 38 minutes ago [-]
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.
smallerize 38 minutes ago [-]
Photos from the moon landings don't have stars in them, because they are exposed for full daylight on the moon.
MarkusQ 54 minutes ago [-]
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.
dylan604 42 minutes ago [-]
Why would you think they are not stars? Not really sure the confusion on the matter. Are we leaning towards this being shot from a soundstage?
Sharlin 46 minutes ago [-]
They're much brighter than the noise floor. Photographic noise doesn't really have such outliers.
MarkusQ 51 minutes ago [-]
Just answered my own question to my satisfaction; they are stars.
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).
MarkusQ 56 minutes ago [-]
Well one of them is obviously Venus. How did you determine the others weren't stars?
layer8 45 minutes ago [-]
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.
Sharlin 50 minutes ago [-]
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.
MrGilbert 12 minutes ago [-]
I love the fact that you can see the aurora at both poles!
consumer451 24 minutes ago [-]
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]
@dang, mods: maybe this should be the post's link. The image quality is much higher.
AndroTux 19 minutes ago [-]
No GPS coordinates in the EXIF data. Would've been funny.
Sharlin 58 minutes ago [-]
It's the night-side Earth, taken at a high ISO value to keep shutter speed fast to prevent blur.
rvnx 57 minutes ago [-]
Ok thank you, makes more sense, I thought it was the day-side
Sharlin 55 minutes ago [-]
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.
seydor 39 minutes ago [-]
whats different between this and all the other pics of earth from various space devices
layer8 24 minutes ago [-]
It’s taken by a human on the way to the moon.
senko 32 minutes ago [-]
This is the night side.
Strom 28 minutes ago [-]
Taken by a different camera, from a different location, at a different time.
longislandguido 1 hours ago [-]
> The image, titled Hello, World
A new hello.jpg?
48 minutes ago [-]
sensanaty 13 minutes ago [-]
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
MiscIdeaMaker99 1 hours ago [-]
What a gorgeous sight to behold!
hmaxwell 1 hours ago [-]
wait why is it round?
delichon 1 hours ago [-]
The shot is from directly above the disc and the great turtle is hidden beneath it.
falcor84 1 hours ago [-]
It's not really round, it's just a lens aberration.
22 minutes ago [-]
evilelectron 24 minutes ago [-]
Hello again dot.
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. — Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994
2 hours ago [-]
brcmthrowaway 8 minutes ago [-]
Does there exist a camera that can zoom into a single person from this distance?
yieldcrv 43 minutes ago [-]
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
They're two separate photos, just taken at different exposure settings.
mbauman 32 minutes ago [-]
Sure enough, thanks for the correction!
sgt 37 minutes ago [-]
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?
Jordan-117 43 minutes ago [-]
"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."
sandworm101 1 hours ago [-]
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?
YZF 1 hours ago [-]
"How to Talk to a Science Denier: Conversations with Flat Earthers, Climate Deniers, and Others Who Defy Reason"
My guess is the answer is: We didn’t really launch Artemis. This is all CG.
NitpickLawyer 51 minutes ago [-]
> This is all CG.
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.
dylan604 39 minutes ago [-]
ahem, Kubrik
the_humblest 34 minutes ago [-]
Don't pay attention to "authorities," think for yourself.
- Feynman
gaurangt 8 minutes ago [-]
Oh, wait, in addition to their usual conspiracy theories, now they can also claim that this is AI-generated!
jgrahamc 1 hours ago [-]
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.
sandworm101 21 minutes ago [-]
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.
itsalwaysthem 1 hours ago [-]
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.
chrisnight 2 minutes ago [-]
Your argument is against large generalizations and straw man arguments, and to prove it, you.. use a generalization and straw man argument?
adrian_b 40 minutes ago [-]
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.
kube-system 1 hours ago [-]
> a planet nobody can see exists and is made of x% helium and is y light years away etc etc
It is taught that the scientific method provides evidence, not certainty, in middle school science curriculum.
maxbond 32 minutes ago [-]
> ...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.
boca_honey 1 hours ago [-]
I'm very suprised no one else is aware of this, on this forum of highly educated people.
They are fighting with shadows, they think they're winning and they're congratulating each other about it, non stop. It's hard to watch.
wat10000 50 minutes ago [-]
Do you believe in Antarctica?
slopinthebag 1 hours ago [-]
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.
maxbond 25 minutes ago [-]
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?
delichon 1 hours ago [-]
I object to being included in this image without a model release and demand that pixel be removed.
delecti 1 hours ago [-]
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.
mememememememo 25 seconds ago [-]
Thanks I was looking for an orientation comment.
layer8 51 minutes ago [-]
South America is visible on the right, and it looks to me like part of North America might also be pictured close to the horizon.
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.
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.
brongondwana 1 hours ago [-]
Tell the world you're REALLY fat without telling the world ...
idiotsecant 49 minutes ago [-]
Bad news, I was across town and I do consent to my pixel being used, so you're outta luck
49 minutes ago [-]
themarogee 17 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
crimshawz 33 minutes ago [-]
[flagged]
the_humblest 41 minutes ago [-]
Faking a trip to the moon does call for some fake imagery, otherwise why even bother?
My only curiosity, and yeah I know orders of significance etc...
Buuuuut I wonder why they didn't consider a Z5[0] 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.
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/
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...
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
I'm sad not alive at a time like Cowboy Bebop oh well, this is a great pic, overview effect
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?
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. — Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994
just the lowest hanging fruit that had been a second class citizen to the marvel of having an extraterrestrial angle to begin with
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/
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.
- Feynman
Conspiracy theorists need to be kept in check. Disengagment is easy but it doesnt help.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They are fighting with shadows, they think they're winning and they're congratulating each other about it, non stop. It's hard to watch.
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?
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...