"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."
sgt
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?
sandworm101
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?
layer8
Don’t you see the reflection of the studio lighting in the middle?
itsalwaysthem
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.
jgrahamc
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.
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.
christophilus
My guess is the answer is: We didn’t really launch Artemis. This is all CG.
the_humblest
Don't pay attention to "authorities," think for yourself.
- Feynman
gaurangt
Oh, wait, in addition to their usual conspiracy theories, now they can also claim that this is AI-generated!
sph
[dead]
MiscIdeaMaker99
What a gorgeous sight to behold!
Sharlin
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!
layer8
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.
madaxe_again
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.
dylan604
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.
BurningFrog
Moonlight is reflected sunlight.
thaumasiotes
> even though moonlight is often thought of as bluish and sunlight as yellowish!
Is that... true? Sunlight is seen as yellow, of course, but the moon is usually thought of as white.
nomilk
Thanks. Until you pointed out it's Earth at night, I had no clue what was supposed to be special about this photo (it appeared suspiciously pixelated for something 'high res', and neighbouring pixels seemed to contrast in colour rather than smoothly complementing as most photos do - but I guess that's random patches of city lights being captured by the camera). Cool stuff!
Something I haven't figured out is: what is that yellow/whitish smudge toward the center of the earth? It looks like camera glare or a reflection?
mr_toad
What does it look like to human eyes? Is there enough light for a person up there to see colour, or would it look like black and white (like a moonlit scene on the ground).
rachel_rig
Same! I mean the last time we were in space the cameras were ... not this good. I can't wait to see more photos from modern hardware!
TimByte
The camera is compensating for extremely low light, so you end up with something that looks closer to a daylight exposure
longislandguido
> The image, titled Hello, World
A new hello.jpg?
hmaxwell
wait why is it round?
delichon
The shot is from directly above the disc and the great turtle is hidden beneath it.
falcor84
It's not really round, it's just a lens aberration.
delichon
I object to being included in this image without a model release and demand that pixel be removed.
brongondwana
Tell the world you're REALLY fat without telling the world ...
delecti
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.
idiotsecant
Bad news, I was across town and I do consent to my pixel being used, so you're outta luck
wishfish
Now I'm wondering about how many people per pixel?
rvnx
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.
Sharlin
It's the night-side Earth, taken at a high ISO value to keep shutter speed fast to prevent blur.
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.
atentaten
Nice. It would've been cool to see what the location information in the EXIF looked like, if it were there.
porphyra
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.
g-mork
250 ms f/4 ISO 512000 in case anyone was wondering. I wonder if they applied any denoise, it looks great for such high ISO
HPsquared
Any GPS data? I wonder if it would pick anything up. Altitude reading would be interesting!
throw0101d
Yes, the D5s are the 'official' Handheld Universal Lunar Cameras (HULCs), but (a?) Z9 also got on-board at the 'last minute' (which means two years ago):
It's fun to think about tile dilation per the exif captured Create Date: "2026:04:03 00:27:39.26". I know it's negligible over the trip, but when they took it, was their time really "2026:04:03 00:27:39.25"?
ge96
Why 'spectacular' the quotes
I'm sad not alive at a time like Cowboy Bebop oh well, this is a great pic, overview effect
layer8
They are quoting NASA.
juleiie
[unexplained loss of data]
alberto467
That’s peak British journalism to have everything in quotes. I’m surprised they didn’t write “allegedly spectacular”.
themarogee
[dead]
sensanaty
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
rapnie
Especially if they knew the sad state of the world whence the rocket was fired from, almost as a distraction of the decay of modern society mankind faces because of their fancy tech and the madmen it enables. I used to be fan of all space tech related stuff, but to me it has lost a lot of its shine. The people of old may say "hey, it is just like Easter island, except their monuments are dedicated to the God of Tech".
MrGilbert
I love the fact that you can see the aurora at both poles!
sva_
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.
Rury
I like the non brightened version, where you can clearly see the light coming from cities. How cool would it be if we saw similar on another planet...
pndy
I may be mistaken but there's even atmosphere visible - that tiny translucent band on the darker photo
TimByte
It almost looks like the Earth has a subtle glow around it
nout
It took me a while to orient myself on that picture, until I realized where Spain is... :)
brcmthrowaway
Does there exist a camera that can zoom into a single person from this distance?
xandrius
Nope, not today that can be easily brought in space. Plus the atmosphere interfering.
It really just is a blue marble floating in nothingness.
suzzer99
Where's Antarctica?
saint_yossarian
Just behind the horizon somewhere on the top right, or maybe some of those clouds are already it.
You can see for yourself in Google Maps if you enable the globe view, unfortunately it seems I can't share a direct link.
mkoryak
This is exactly what I need for printing as 14x10 4x6 photos stitched together!
eager_learner
this ought to put flat-earthers completely down. :)
getnormality
If you're confused what you're looking at, turn it upside down.
abdusco
West Africa & Gibraltar strait
thumbsup-_-
Imagine that all our joys, problems and attachments are within that blue sphere
bilsbie
Can we confirm the cloud patterns match weather data from the same time? Might be a good way to verify.
darknavi
Verify what?
greentea23
No, that part of NASA was defunded.
whycombinetor
"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)
rationalist
Technically correct, the best kind of correct. After all, the moon is in Earth's orbit.
xyzsparetimexyz
Theyre travelling to a region of space where the moons gravity is more important than the earths though. I think that counts
pdonis
> It is the first time since 1972 that humans have travelled outside of the Earth's orbit.
They mean outside of low Earth orbit (which basically means further away than the ISS). The phrasing is not ideal.
> Earth's gravitational dominance extends 4x the distance to the moon
"Earth's gravitational dominance" is not a single thing; it depends on what kind of "dominance" you're talking about.
For example, even though the Moon is usually described as being in orbit about the Earth, its orbit is always concave towards the Sun. In other words, its net gravitational acceleration is always towards the Sun--even when the Earth is on the other side of it from the Sun. So by this criterion it's not in orbit about the Earth, it's in orbit about the Sun, doing a complicated do-si-do with the Earth, also in orbit about the Sun.
I'm not sure what definition of "dominance" you're using that extends the Earth's "dominance" to 4 times the distance of the Moon.
dzonga
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.
thenthenthen
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.
I remember watching grainy B+W ones in the 80s via a dish. It might have been a slow scan signal back then? It blew my mind watching the Earth live as a disk, seeing the weather in realtime.
rav3ndust
to quote the old meme:
> hey, i'm in a picture with all my friends!
nntwozz
For anyone not understanding the high ISO please have a look at this recent video by minutephysics.
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.
tacostakohashi
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.
jumpkick
I had a similar thought at first, and then remembered the steady technical progress of the Shuttle era (at least from my recollection).
TimByte
I get that feeling, but I think a lot of the "texture" we remember is really just the limitations of the tech at the time
radium3d
Did they mount my Canon 7D to the outside? :D reminds me of the familiar grain haha
erelong
Literally a wasteful distraction from more important things
1zael
How are people still flat-earthers after stuff like this
heresie-dabord
Because without the network effect of adequate education, scientific understanding doesn't scale.
What does scale, unfortunately, is arrant nonsense.
rootusrootus
Maybe I'm just a dumb optimist, but I've always assumed that the flat earthers started out as an enteraining debate club intentionally trying to prove something impossible just for the challenge, which got overtaken by a tiny number of vocal idiots. I have heard they largely have moved on to Qanon, which tracks.
JBits
You can't claim to have superior knowledge if you admit you're wrong.
boca_honey
This photo could be easily faked. I don't believe the Earth is flat, but I also don't think everybody on the planet should be 100% on one side of a discussion. Even if flat-earthers are kinda dumb, I think it's worse to force everyone into intellectual submission just because you're "right".
chungy
I'm pretty sure people claim to be flat-earthers as a lark.
VoodooJuJu
[dead]
thegrim33
They aren't, what you see is a combination of trolls and propagandists; very few real human beings actually believe in such things.
CommenterPerson
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".
getnormality
I was thinking the same thing, but then I decided to embrace the frustration of the image. It's reminding us that the pictures we have in our heads are kind of fragile. They don't prepare us for a live encounter with Earth from some random angle in space.
spopejoy
I asked a different question in my mind, who says it "appears to us as upside down"? I would think if you lived in Patagonia, the south pole is "up".
s4i
I personally prefer to view it in the same orientation the photographer saw it in their viewfinder. Makes me feel more like I’m inside the vessle looking at the planet.
mr_toad
If you live in the southern hemisphere most pictures of the Moon that you see online look upside down compared to ones that you take yourself.
steve-atx-7600
To paraphrase Carl Sagan: insignificant plant in an insignificant galaxy and there’s a good chance we’ll annihilate ourselves.
evolve2k
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?
mccraveiro
1972 -> taken during daytime
2026 -> taken during nightime
dsego
> Surely our camera gear is exponentially better now
They are better, but not exponentially. You can't beat physics, film cameras can still compete in terms of dynamic range and resolution, the optical elements haven't changed that much. The 1972 photo was taken on medium format film, which is twice the size of the sensor area in the modern one, which means more photons and less noise. The recent image was take at a really high ISO, which adds to the noisiness.
firefoxd
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?
pdonis
I think the clocks on board Orion are set to Houston time, which would be 5 hours behind UTC (because of Daylight Saving). But I'm not sure. I would expect the EXIF time to be in whatever time zone the spacecraft's clocks are set to.
> clocks tick slower under the moon's weaker gravity. (Or is it faster?)
Compared to clocks at rest on Earth, clocks on board Orion right now are ticking faster, because it's at a high enough altitude above the Earth that the faster ticking due to higher altitude outweighs the slower ticking due to speed relative to the Earth.
That will be true for most of the mission. For clocks in orbit about the Earth, the "breakeven point" where the altitude effect and the speed effect cancel out and the clock ticks at the same rate as an Earth clock is at, IIRC, about 1.5 Earth radii. So clocks on the ISS, for example, tick slower than Earth clocks; but clocks on the GPS satellites (orbiting at 4.2 Earth radii) tick faster (and there is an adjustment made for this on each satellite so that the time signals they send out match Earth clock rates).
For a spacecraft moving at escape velocity, which is going to be roughly true for Orion all the way until splashdown, I think the "breakeven point" is higher, at a little over 2 Earth radii. Orion will reach that point on the way back a few hours before splashdown, I think.
The Moon's gravity well is too shallow to make an appreciable difference in any of these calculations.
I should emphasize that all these tick rate effects are tiny, on the order of one part in a billion to one part in a hundred billion. Even when you add up the difference over the entire mission, it's still only on the order of hundreds of microseconds (i.e., the astronauts end up aging a few hundred microseconds more than people who stayed on Earth).
throw_await
Line 30 of the exif dump in the gist linked above gives an offset of -05:00
Rodmine
Once video models get better, hope we can also see some videos.
bytesandbits
here the original NASA photos at high resolution without unnecessary ads.
That picture of the "dark" Earth is most fascinating because everyone has seen a million images of Earth before, but how many have seen it in this view. The image by itself says a little about the Earths place in the planetary system.
mrcwinn
A beautiful reminder of what's possible with photography when you're using more than a comparatively crappy iPhone Pro Max camera. (Oh and taking the shot from Outer Space.)
Helmut10001
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?
Arpitbhalla
just curious to know why is there no dark on opposite side if sun is another side?
picafrost
This is all we've got. We need to do a better job of preserving it.
Xiol
Unfortunately that would affect shareholder value.
hermannj314
One of the objectives of the Artemis missions is to prepare for Mars travel, none of the objectives of Artemis are to view Earth as the only planet we have nor to preserve it.
throwaway2037
> We need to do a better job of preserving it.
I reject this sentiment. Ask anyone that you know who lived through the 1960s in a rich country. Their experience is nearly all the same: The air quality and environmental pollution was appalling. When my mother lived in Manhattan (New York City) in the 1960s, she would return home from work, and wipe her face with a cloth. The cloth had black streaks from all the pollution. Today, it is a different world in rich countries. They have cleaned up.
Finally: Yes, global warming is real, but the threat is different. I predict that we will far exceed the average increase in global average temperature, but we will survive. Yes, we will survive, but with some "scars".
deepsun
Where are the turtles?
chistev
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.
>The burn took the Orion spacecraft out of Earth orbit...
No it didn't. That would be catastrophic and likely fatal. They are going to the Moon, which is also in Earth orbit.
14
I often think about what an amazing time it is to be alive and how amazing all the tech we have at our fingertips is.
But I am also incredibly saddened by the fact that I was probably born just shy of routine space travel.
I can not even imagine how amazing it would be to look down on earth and see it in its entirety. Hopefully my kids or my grandkids will be able to achieve my dream and do exactly that.
0x1ceb00da
If you had routine space travel, you would be upset that you can't time travel.
Vincsenzo
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.
qingcharles
NASA confirmed it is Venus, yeah.
polskibus
Why is the old image so much more blue? Did pollution increase cause this change in color over time?
alex_duf
One was taken during daylight on film, which needs to be processed and scanned, the other one was taken at high ISO during night time on a digital camera.
So much interpretation is done on colour on each step of the way that it's not surprising the colours are looking different.
Why is spectacular in quotations? I keep seeing this in headlines, is it because they're quoting a single word?
tantalor
It's lazy "editorializing"
not_a_bot_4sho
Yes
jameshart
It’s a BBC journalistic standards thing; the BBC doesn’t want to express an opinion about the image, they are relaying that as a quote from someone about the image. The word “spectacular” is attributed to NASA in the article.
It's one of those stark reminders that there's no such thing as up or down in space, and something that disabuses me of the notion that I can truly comprehend "the enemy gate is down".
fanatic2pope
Very cool. Along the same lines the EPIC::DSCOVR mission has been taking photos of the earth since, I believe, around 2015.
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.
djfobbz
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.
diyseguy
Gotta love the sarcastic quotes
skyskys
WOW!!!!
egeozcan
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.
MengerSponge
Good news! We already have that! If you pay taxes to the US that's one of the thing you've helped pay for:
For reasons that are unexplainable if you're the NYTimes, polluting industries have been trying to kill these missions for decades.
TimByte
It sounds trivial, but perspective shots like this are part of why public support for space programs exists at all
TimByte
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
Fairburn
Nothing spectacular about it.
Except for the obvious degradation of our planet, there isnt anything
special about it. Its just our home.
"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."
sgt
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?
sandworm101
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?
layer8
Don’t you see the reflection of the studio lighting in the middle?
itsalwaysthem
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.
jgrahamc
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.
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.
christophilus
My guess is the answer is: We didn’t really launch Artemis. This is all CG.
the_humblest
Don't pay attention to "authorities," think for yourself.
- Feynman
gaurangt
Oh, wait, in addition to their usual conspiracy theories, now they can also claim that this is AI-generated!
sph
[dead]
MiscIdeaMaker99
What a gorgeous sight to behold!
Sharlin
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!
layer8
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.
madaxe_again
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.
dylan604
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.
BurningFrog
Moonlight is reflected sunlight.
thaumasiotes
> even though moonlight is often thought of as bluish and sunlight as yellowish!
Is that... true? Sunlight is seen as yellow, of course, but the moon is usually thought of as white.
nomilk
Thanks. Until you pointed out it's Earth at night, I had no clue what was supposed to be special about this photo (it appeared suspiciously pixelated for something 'high res', and neighbouring pixels seemed to contrast in colour rather than smoothly complementing as most photos do - but I guess that's random patches of city lights being captured by the camera). Cool stuff!
Something I haven't figured out is: what is that yellow/whitish smudge toward the center of the earth? It looks like camera glare or a reflection?
mr_toad
What does it look like to human eyes? Is there enough light for a person up there to see colour, or would it look like black and white (like a moonlit scene on the ground).
rachel_rig
Same! I mean the last time we were in space the cameras were ... not this good. I can't wait to see more photos from modern hardware!
TimByte
The camera is compensating for extremely low light, so you end up with something that looks closer to a daylight exposure
longislandguido
> The image, titled Hello, World
A new hello.jpg?
hmaxwell
wait why is it round?
delichon
The shot is from directly above the disc and the great turtle is hidden beneath it.
falcor84
It's not really round, it's just a lens aberration.
delichon
I object to being included in this image without a model release and demand that pixel be removed.
brongondwana
Tell the world you're REALLY fat without telling the world ...
delecti
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.
idiotsecant
Bad news, I was across town and I do consent to my pixel being used, so you're outta luck
wishfish
Now I'm wondering about how many people per pixel?
rvnx
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.
Sharlin
It's the night-side Earth, taken at a high ISO value to keep shutter speed fast to prevent blur.
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.
atentaten
Nice. It would've been cool to see what the location information in the EXIF looked like, if it were there.
porphyra
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.
g-mork
250 ms f/4 ISO 512000 in case anyone was wondering. I wonder if they applied any denoise, it looks great for such high ISO
HPsquared
Any GPS data? I wonder if it would pick anything up. Altitude reading would be interesting!
throw0101d
Yes, the D5s are the 'official' Handheld Universal Lunar Cameras (HULCs), but (a?) Z9 also got on-board at the 'last minute' (which means two years ago):
It's fun to think about tile dilation per the exif captured Create Date: "2026:04:03 00:27:39.26". I know it's negligible over the trip, but when they took it, was their time really "2026:04:03 00:27:39.25"?
ge96
Why 'spectacular' the quotes
I'm sad not alive at a time like Cowboy Bebop oh well, this is a great pic, overview effect
layer8
They are quoting NASA.
juleiie
[unexplained loss of data]
alberto467
That’s peak British journalism to have everything in quotes. I’m surprised they didn’t write “allegedly spectacular”.
themarogee
[dead]
sensanaty
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
rapnie
Especially if they knew the sad state of the world whence the rocket was fired from, almost as a distraction of the decay of modern society mankind faces because of their fancy tech and the madmen it enables. I used to be fan of all space tech related stuff, but to me it has lost a lot of its shine. The people of old may say "hey, it is just like Easter island, except their monuments are dedicated to the God of Tech".
MrGilbert
I love the fact that you can see the aurora at both poles!
sva_
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.
Rury
I like the non brightened version, where you can clearly see the light coming from cities. How cool would it be if we saw similar on another planet...
pndy
I may be mistaken but there's even atmosphere visible - that tiny translucent band on the darker photo
TimByte
It almost looks like the Earth has a subtle glow around it
nout
It took me a while to orient myself on that picture, until I realized where Spain is... :)
brcmthrowaway
Does there exist a camera that can zoom into a single person from this distance?
xandrius
Nope, not today that can be easily brought in space. Plus the atmosphere interfering.
It really just is a blue marble floating in nothingness.
suzzer99
Where's Antarctica?
saint_yossarian
Just behind the horizon somewhere on the top right, or maybe some of those clouds are already it.
You can see for yourself in Google Maps if you enable the globe view, unfortunately it seems I can't share a direct link.
mkoryak
This is exactly what I need for printing as 14x10 4x6 photos stitched together!
eager_learner
this ought to put flat-earthers completely down. :)
getnormality
If you're confused what you're looking at, turn it upside down.
abdusco
West Africa & Gibraltar strait
thumbsup-_-
Imagine that all our joys, problems and attachments are within that blue sphere
bilsbie
Can we confirm the cloud patterns match weather data from the same time? Might be a good way to verify.
darknavi
Verify what?
greentea23
No, that part of NASA was defunded.
whycombinetor
"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)
rationalist
Technically correct, the best kind of correct. After all, the moon is in Earth's orbit.
xyzsparetimexyz
Theyre travelling to a region of space where the moons gravity is more important than the earths though. I think that counts
pdonis
> It is the first time since 1972 that humans have travelled outside of the Earth's orbit.
They mean outside of low Earth orbit (which basically means further away than the ISS). The phrasing is not ideal.
> Earth's gravitational dominance extends 4x the distance to the moon
"Earth's gravitational dominance" is not a single thing; it depends on what kind of "dominance" you're talking about.
For example, even though the Moon is usually described as being in orbit about the Earth, its orbit is always concave towards the Sun. In other words, its net gravitational acceleration is always towards the Sun--even when the Earth is on the other side of it from the Sun. So by this criterion it's not in orbit about the Earth, it's in orbit about the Sun, doing a complicated do-si-do with the Earth, also in orbit about the Sun.
I'm not sure what definition of "dominance" you're using that extends the Earth's "dominance" to 4 times the distance of the Moon.
dzonga
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.
thenthenthen
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.
I remember watching grainy B+W ones in the 80s via a dish. It might have been a slow scan signal back then? It blew my mind watching the Earth live as a disk, seeing the weather in realtime.
rav3ndust
to quote the old meme:
> hey, i'm in a picture with all my friends!
nntwozz
For anyone not understanding the high ISO please have a look at this recent video by minutephysics.
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.
tacostakohashi
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.
jumpkick
I had a similar thought at first, and then remembered the steady technical progress of the Shuttle era (at least from my recollection).
TimByte
I get that feeling, but I think a lot of the "texture" we remember is really just the limitations of the tech at the time
radium3d
Did they mount my Canon 7D to the outside? :D reminds me of the familiar grain haha
erelong
Literally a wasteful distraction from more important things
1zael
How are people still flat-earthers after stuff like this
heresie-dabord
Because without the network effect of adequate education, scientific understanding doesn't scale.
What does scale, unfortunately, is arrant nonsense.
rootusrootus
Maybe I'm just a dumb optimist, but I've always assumed that the flat earthers started out as an enteraining debate club intentionally trying to prove something impossible just for the challenge, which got overtaken by a tiny number of vocal idiots. I have heard they largely have moved on to Qanon, which tracks.
JBits
You can't claim to have superior knowledge if you admit you're wrong.
boca_honey
This photo could be easily faked. I don't believe the Earth is flat, but I also don't think everybody on the planet should be 100% on one side of a discussion. Even if flat-earthers are kinda dumb, I think it's worse to force everyone into intellectual submission just because you're "right".
chungy
I'm pretty sure people claim to be flat-earthers as a lark.
VoodooJuJu
[dead]
thegrim33
They aren't, what you see is a combination of trolls and propagandists; very few real human beings actually believe in such things.
CommenterPerson
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".
getnormality
I was thinking the same thing, but then I decided to embrace the frustration of the image. It's reminding us that the pictures we have in our heads are kind of fragile. They don't prepare us for a live encounter with Earth from some random angle in space.
spopejoy
I asked a different question in my mind, who says it "appears to us as upside down"? I would think if you lived in Patagonia, the south pole is "up".
s4i
I personally prefer to view it in the same orientation the photographer saw it in their viewfinder. Makes me feel more like I’m inside the vessle looking at the planet.
mr_toad
If you live in the southern hemisphere most pictures of the Moon that you see online look upside down compared to ones that you take yourself.
steve-atx-7600
To paraphrase Carl Sagan: insignificant plant in an insignificant galaxy and there’s a good chance we’ll annihilate ourselves.
evolve2k
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?
mccraveiro
1972 -> taken during daytime
2026 -> taken during nightime
dsego
> Surely our camera gear is exponentially better now
They are better, but not exponentially. You can't beat physics, film cameras can still compete in terms of dynamic range and resolution, the optical elements haven't changed that much. The 1972 photo was taken on medium format film, which is twice the size of the sensor area in the modern one, which means more photons and less noise. The recent image was take at a really high ISO, which adds to the noisiness.
firefoxd
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?
pdonis
I think the clocks on board Orion are set to Houston time, which would be 5 hours behind UTC (because of Daylight Saving). But I'm not sure. I would expect the EXIF time to be in whatever time zone the spacecraft's clocks are set to.
> clocks tick slower under the moon's weaker gravity. (Or is it faster?)
Compared to clocks at rest on Earth, clocks on board Orion right now are ticking faster, because it's at a high enough altitude above the Earth that the faster ticking due to higher altitude outweighs the slower ticking due to speed relative to the Earth.
That will be true for most of the mission. For clocks in orbit about the Earth, the "breakeven point" where the altitude effect and the speed effect cancel out and the clock ticks at the same rate as an Earth clock is at, IIRC, about 1.5 Earth radii. So clocks on the ISS, for example, tick slower than Earth clocks; but clocks on the GPS satellites (orbiting at 4.2 Earth radii) tick faster (and there is an adjustment made for this on each satellite so that the time signals they send out match Earth clock rates).
For a spacecraft moving at escape velocity, which is going to be roughly true for Orion all the way until splashdown, I think the "breakeven point" is higher, at a little over 2 Earth radii. Orion will reach that point on the way back a few hours before splashdown, I think.
The Moon's gravity well is too shallow to make an appreciable difference in any of these calculations.
I should emphasize that all these tick rate effects are tiny, on the order of one part in a billion to one part in a hundred billion. Even when you add up the difference over the entire mission, it's still only on the order of hundreds of microseconds (i.e., the astronauts end up aging a few hundred microseconds more than people who stayed on Earth).
throw_await
Line 30 of the exif dump in the gist linked above gives an offset of -05:00
Rodmine
Once video models get better, hope we can also see some videos.
bytesandbits
here the original NASA photos at high resolution without unnecessary ads.
That picture of the "dark" Earth is most fascinating because everyone has seen a million images of Earth before, but how many have seen it in this view. The image by itself says a little about the Earths place in the planetary system.
mrcwinn
A beautiful reminder of what's possible with photography when you're using more than a comparatively crappy iPhone Pro Max camera. (Oh and taking the shot from Outer Space.)
Helmut10001
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?
Arpitbhalla
just curious to know why is there no dark on opposite side if sun is another side?
picafrost
This is all we've got. We need to do a better job of preserving it.
Xiol
Unfortunately that would affect shareholder value.
hermannj314
One of the objectives of the Artemis missions is to prepare for Mars travel, none of the objectives of Artemis are to view Earth as the only planet we have nor to preserve it.
throwaway2037
> We need to do a better job of preserving it.
I reject this sentiment. Ask anyone that you know who lived through the 1960s in a rich country. Their experience is nearly all the same: The air quality and environmental pollution was appalling. When my mother lived in Manhattan (New York City) in the 1960s, she would return home from work, and wipe her face with a cloth. The cloth had black streaks from all the pollution. Today, it is a different world in rich countries. They have cleaned up.
Finally: Yes, global warming is real, but the threat is different. I predict that we will far exceed the average increase in global average temperature, but we will survive. Yes, we will survive, but with some "scars".
deepsun
Where are the turtles?
chistev
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.
>The burn took the Orion spacecraft out of Earth orbit...
No it didn't. That would be catastrophic and likely fatal. They are going to the Moon, which is also in Earth orbit.
14
I often think about what an amazing time it is to be alive and how amazing all the tech we have at our fingertips is.
But I am also incredibly saddened by the fact that I was probably born just shy of routine space travel.
I can not even imagine how amazing it would be to look down on earth and see it in its entirety. Hopefully my kids or my grandkids will be able to achieve my dream and do exactly that.
0x1ceb00da
If you had routine space travel, you would be upset that you can't time travel.
Vincsenzo
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.
qingcharles
NASA confirmed it is Venus, yeah.
polskibus
Why is the old image so much more blue? Did pollution increase cause this change in color over time?
alex_duf
One was taken during daylight on film, which needs to be processed and scanned, the other one was taken at high ISO during night time on a digital camera.
So much interpretation is done on colour on each step of the way that it's not surprising the colours are looking different.
Why is spectacular in quotations? I keep seeing this in headlines, is it because they're quoting a single word?
tantalor
It's lazy "editorializing"
not_a_bot_4sho
Yes
jameshart
It’s a BBC journalistic standards thing; the BBC doesn’t want to express an opinion about the image, they are relaying that as a quote from someone about the image. The word “spectacular” is attributed to NASA in the article.
It's one of those stark reminders that there's no such thing as up or down in space, and something that disabuses me of the notion that I can truly comprehend "the enemy gate is down".
fanatic2pope
Very cool. Along the same lines the EPIC::DSCOVR mission has been taking photos of the earth since, I believe, around 2015.
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.
djfobbz
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.
diyseguy
Gotta love the sarcastic quotes
skyskys
WOW!!!!
egeozcan
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.
MengerSponge
Good news! We already have that! If you pay taxes to the US that's one of the thing you've helped pay for:
For reasons that are unexplainable if you're the NYTimes, polluting industries have been trying to kill these missions for decades.
TimByte
It sounds trivial, but perspective shots like this are part of why public support for space programs exists at all
TimByte
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
Fairburn
Nothing spectacular about it.
Except for the obvious degradation of our planet, there isnt anything
special about it. Its just our home.
Anyone find the full res version of this ?
Nasa images page is useless. Government work.
They're here: https://www.nasa.gov/gallery/journey-to-the-moon/
Direct link to this image: https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/art002e00019...
"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."
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?
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?
Don’t you see the reflection of the studio lighting in the middle?
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.
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.
This was a fantastic YouTube video on flat earther beliefs from a few years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTfhYyTuT44
Spoiler - they mostly switched to QAnon instead.
"How to Talk to a Science Denier: Conversations with Flat Earthers, Climate Deniers, and Others Who Defy Reason"
https://www.amazon.ca/How-Talk-Science-Denier-Conversations/...
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.
My guess is the answer is: We didn’t really launch Artemis. This is all CG.
Don't pay attention to "authorities," think for yourself.
- Feynman
Oh, wait, in addition to their usual conspiracy theories, now they can also claim that this is AI-generated!
[dead]
What a gorgeous sight to behold!
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!
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.
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.
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.
Moonlight is reflected sunlight.
> even though moonlight is often thought of as bluish and sunlight as yellowish!
Is that... true? Sunlight is seen as yellow, of course, but the moon is usually thought of as white.
Thanks. Until you pointed out it's Earth at night, I had no clue what was supposed to be special about this photo (it appeared suspiciously pixelated for something 'high res', and neighbouring pixels seemed to contrast in colour rather than smoothly complementing as most photos do - but I guess that's random patches of city lights being captured by the camera). Cool stuff!
Something I haven't figured out is: what is that yellow/whitish smudge toward the center of the earth? It looks like camera glare or a reflection?
What does it look like to human eyes? Is there enough light for a person up there to see colour, or would it look like black and white (like a moonlit scene on the ground).
Same! I mean the last time we were in space the cameras were ... not this good. I can't wait to see more photos from modern hardware!
The camera is compensating for extremely low light, so you end up with something that looks closer to a daylight exposure
> The image, titled Hello, World
A new hello.jpg?
wait why is it round?
The shot is from directly above the disc and the great turtle is hidden beneath it.
It's not really round, it's just a lens aberration.
I object to being included in this image without a model release and demand that pixel be removed.
Tell the world you're REALLY fat without telling the world ...
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.
Bad news, I was across town and I do consent to my pixel being used, so you're outta luck
Now I'm wondering about how many people per pixel?
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.
It's the night-side Earth, taken at a high ISO value to keep shutter speed fast to prevent blur.
No, it's BBC's compression of that image.
Look at the original: https://www.nasa.gov/image-detail/fd02_for-pao/
It's grainy, but the detail is terrific.
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
Faking a trip to the moon does call for some fake imagery, otherwise why even bother?
It sure does. But this trip is real. As was Apollo.
whats different between this and all the other pics of earth from various space devices
This is the night side.
Taken by a different camera, from a different location, at a different time.
It’s taken by a human on the way to the moon.
I saw someone point out on reddit that this probably the first digital picture of the whole earth (well, 1 side of it) taken by a person
Apollo used film and it's been a long time since anyone has gone past LEO
[flagged]
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]
[0] https://old.reddit.com/user/astro_pettit
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42701645
Hello again dot.
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. — Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994
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...
Thanks! This was my first question.
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.
Before Lightroom it might have looked closer to this: https://images-assets.nasa.gov/image/art002e000193/art002e00...
https://exifinfo.org/detail/RjJtDLtCfS5kpq0fM2e7yA
...
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.
Nice. It would've been cool to see what the location information in the EXIF looked like, if it were there.
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.
250 ms f/4 ISO 512000 in case anyone was wondering. I wonder if they applied any denoise, it looks great for such high ISO
Any GPS data? I wonder if it would pick anything up. Altitude reading would be interesting!
Yes, the D5s are the 'official' Handheld Universal Lunar Cameras (HULCs), but (a?) Z9 also got on-board at the 'last minute' (which means two years ago):
https://petapixel.com/2026/04/02/a-nikon-z9-made-it-aboard-t...
They have a thermal blanket for exterior work:
https://petapixel.com/2026/02/24/artemis-ii-astronauts-will-...
https://petapixel.com/2025/01/10/the-custom-nikon-z9-and-the...
Various stories with the "Artemis" tag: https://petapixel.com/tag/artemis/
The D5 has been used on the ISS, including EVAs, since 2017, so they're a known quantity:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cameras_on_the_Interna...
The Mercury and Apollo missions used Hasselblad 500-series-based cameras (modified):
https://www.hasselblad.com/about/history/hasselblad-in-space...
It also seems like very little was done in Lightroom.
This is consistent with good photographic technique that prioritizes "getting it right in the camera."
Wild. I saw a quick glance and assumed the Z9 but the D5 is near the peak of the DSLR world so I guess.
The EXIF data says that the picture was taken with the flash off!
How did they get the Earth to light up when it is obviously dark outside? Is this fake?
Almost 6 decades later, Omega still has a firm hold on NASA by the wrist. https://www.gearpatrol.com/watches/omega-speedmaster-artemis...
It's fun to think about tile dilation per the exif captured Create Date: "2026:04:03 00:27:39.26". I know it's negligible over the trip, but when they took it, was their time really "2026:04:03 00:27:39.25"?
Why 'spectacular' the quotes
I'm sad not alive at a time like Cowboy Bebop oh well, this is a great pic, overview effect
They are quoting NASA.
[unexplained loss of data]
That’s peak British journalism to have everything in quotes. I’m surprised they didn’t write “allegedly spectacular”.
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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
Especially if they knew the sad state of the world whence the rocket was fired from, almost as a distraction of the decay of modern society mankind faces because of their fancy tech and the madmen it enables. I used to be fan of all space tech related stuff, but to me it has lost a lot of its shine. The people of old may say "hey, it is just like Easter island, except their monuments are dedicated to the God of Tech".
I love the fact that you can see the aurora at both poles!
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.
I like the non brightened version, where you can clearly see the light coming from cities. How cool would it be if we saw similar on another planet...
I may be mistaken but there's even atmosphere visible - that tiny translucent band on the darker photo
It almost looks like the Earth has a subtle glow around it
It took me a while to orient myself on that picture, until I realized where Spain is... :)
Does there exist a camera that can zoom into a single person from this distance?
Nope, not today that can be easily brought in space. Plus the atmosphere interfering.
Relevant XKCD "what if?" [0] is relevant.
[0] - https://what-if.xkcd.com/32/
What clearance level do you have?
Can't decide if this is "MOEAGARE ARUCHIMISU" moment or a "Transcending Time" moment.
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...
It disappoints me greatly they're not raw :(
truly stunning picture
Can I see the thin band of atmosphere?
It really just is a blue marble floating in nothingness.
Where's Antarctica?
Just behind the horizon somewhere on the top right, or maybe some of those clouds are already it.
You can see for yourself in Google Maps if you enable the globe view, unfortunately it seems I can't share a direct link.
This is exactly what I need for printing as 14x10 4x6 photos stitched together!
this ought to put flat-earthers completely down. :)
If you're confused what you're looking at, turn it upside down.
West Africa & Gibraltar strait
Imagine that all our joys, problems and attachments are within that blue sphere
Can we confirm the cloud patterns match weather data from the same time? Might be a good way to verify.
Verify what?
No, that part of NASA was defunded.
"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)
Technically correct, the best kind of correct. After all, the moon is in Earth's orbit.
Theyre travelling to a region of space where the moons gravity is more important than the earths though. I think that counts
> It is the first time since 1972 that humans have travelled outside of the Earth's orbit.
They mean outside of low Earth orbit (which basically means further away than the ISS). The phrasing is not ideal.
> Earth's gravitational dominance extends 4x the distance to the moon
"Earth's gravitational dominance" is not a single thing; it depends on what kind of "dominance" you're talking about.
For example, even though the Moon is usually described as being in orbit about the Earth, its orbit is always concave towards the Sun. In other words, its net gravitational acceleration is always towards the Sun--even when the Earth is on the other side of it from the Sun. So by this criterion it's not in orbit about the Earth, it's in orbit about the Sun, doing a complicated do-si-do with the Earth, also in orbit about the Sun.
I'm not sure what definition of "dominance" you're using that extends the Earth's "dominance" to 4 times the distance of the Moon.
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.
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.
And they can be found online pretty easily: https://himawari8.nict.go.jp/.
I remember there's some tools to use the images as desktop backgrounds: https://github.com/boramalper/himawaripy
I remember watching grainy B+W ones in the 80s via a dish. It might have been a slow scan signal back then? It blew my mind watching the Earth live as a disk, seeing the weather in realtime.
to quote the old meme:
> hey, i'm in a picture with all my friends!
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...
https://youtu.be/ZWSvHBG7X0w
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.
I had a similar thought at first, and then remembered the steady technical progress of the Shuttle era (at least from my recollection).
I get that feeling, but I think a lot of the "texture" we remember is really just the limitations of the tech at the time
Did they mount my Canon 7D to the outside? :D reminds me of the familiar grain haha
Literally a wasteful distraction from more important things
How are people still flat-earthers after stuff like this
Because without the network effect of adequate education, scientific understanding doesn't scale.
What does scale, unfortunately, is arrant nonsense.
Maybe I'm just a dumb optimist, but I've always assumed that the flat earthers started out as an enteraining debate club intentionally trying to prove something impossible just for the challenge, which got overtaken by a tiny number of vocal idiots. I have heard they largely have moved on to Qanon, which tracks.
You can't claim to have superior knowledge if you admit you're wrong.
This photo could be easily faked. I don't believe the Earth is flat, but I also don't think everybody on the planet should be 100% on one side of a discussion. Even if flat-earthers are kinda dumb, I think it's worse to force everyone into intellectual submission just because you're "right".
I'm pretty sure people claim to be flat-earthers as a lark.
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They aren't, what you see is a combination of trolls and propagandists; very few real human beings actually believe in such things.
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".
I was thinking the same thing, but then I decided to embrace the frustration of the image. It's reminding us that the pictures we have in our heads are kind of fragile. They don't prepare us for a live encounter with Earth from some random angle in space.
I asked a different question in my mind, who says it "appears to us as upside down"? I would think if you lived in Patagonia, the south pole is "up".
I personally prefer to view it in the same orientation the photographer saw it in their viewfinder. Makes me feel more like I’m inside the vessle looking at the planet.
If you live in the southern hemisphere most pictures of the Moon that you see online look upside down compared to ones that you take yourself.
To paraphrase Carl Sagan: insignificant plant in an insignificant galaxy and there’s a good chance we’ll annihilate ourselves.
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?
1972 -> taken during daytime 2026 -> taken during nightime
> Surely our camera gear is exponentially better now
They are better, but not exponentially. You can't beat physics, film cameras can still compete in terms of dynamic range and resolution, the optical elements haven't changed that much. The 1972 photo was taken on medium format film, which is twice the size of the sensor area in the modern one, which means more photons and less noise. The recent image was take at a really high ISO, which adds to the noisiness.
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?
I think the clocks on board Orion are set to Houston time, which would be 5 hours behind UTC (because of Daylight Saving). But I'm not sure. I would expect the EXIF time to be in whatever time zone the spacecraft's clocks are set to.
> clocks tick slower under the moon's weaker gravity. (Or is it faster?)
Compared to clocks at rest on Earth, clocks on board Orion right now are ticking faster, because it's at a high enough altitude above the Earth that the faster ticking due to higher altitude outweighs the slower ticking due to speed relative to the Earth.
That will be true for most of the mission. For clocks in orbit about the Earth, the "breakeven point" where the altitude effect and the speed effect cancel out and the clock ticks at the same rate as an Earth clock is at, IIRC, about 1.5 Earth radii. So clocks on the ISS, for example, tick slower than Earth clocks; but clocks on the GPS satellites (orbiting at 4.2 Earth radii) tick faster (and there is an adjustment made for this on each satellite so that the time signals they send out match Earth clock rates).
For a spacecraft moving at escape velocity, which is going to be roughly true for Orion all the way until splashdown, I think the "breakeven point" is higher, at a little over 2 Earth radii. Orion will reach that point on the way back a few hours before splashdown, I think.
The Moon's gravity well is too shallow to make an appreciable difference in any of these calculations.
I should emphasize that all these tick rate effects are tiny, on the order of one part in a billion to one part in a hundred billion. Even when you add up the difference over the entire mission, it's still only on the order of hundreds of microseconds (i.e., the astronauts end up aging a few hundred microseconds more than people who stayed on Earth).
Line 30 of the exif dump in the gist linked above gives an offset of -05:00
Once video models get better, hope we can also see some videos.
here the original NASA photos at high resolution without unnecessary ads.
https://www.nasa.gov/gallery/journey-to-the-moon/
https://artemis-tracker.netlify.app/
https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/hello-world/
That picture of the "dark" Earth is most fascinating because everyone has seen a million images of Earth before, but how many have seen it in this view. The image by itself says a little about the Earths place in the planetary system.
A beautiful reminder of what's possible with photography when you're using more than a comparatively crappy iPhone Pro Max camera. (Oh and taking the shot from Outer Space.)
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?
just curious to know why is there no dark on opposite side if sun is another side?
This is all we've got. We need to do a better job of preserving it.
Unfortunately that would affect shareholder value.
One of the objectives of the Artemis missions is to prepare for Mars travel, none of the objectives of Artemis are to view Earth as the only planet we have nor to preserve it.
Finally: Yes, global warming is real, but the threat is different. I predict that we will far exceed the average increase in global average temperature, but we will survive. Yes, we will survive, but with some "scars".
Where are the turtles?
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.
https://www.rxjourney.net/30-things-i-know
>The burn took the Orion spacecraft out of Earth orbit...
No it didn't. That would be catastrophic and likely fatal. They are going to the Moon, which is also in Earth orbit.
I often think about what an amazing time it is to be alive and how amazing all the tech we have at our fingertips is. But I am also incredibly saddened by the fact that I was probably born just shy of routine space travel. I can not even imagine how amazing it would be to look down on earth and see it in its entirety. Hopefully my kids or my grandkids will be able to achieve my dream and do exactly that.
If you had routine space travel, you would be upset that you can't time travel.
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.
NASA confirmed it is Venus, yeah.
Why is the old image so much more blue? Did pollution increase cause this change in color over time?
One was taken during daylight on film, which needs to be processed and scanned, the other one was taken at high ISO during night time on a digital camera.
So much interpretation is done on colour on each step of the way that it's not surprising the colours are looking different.
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.
What a mad idea.
The aesthetic ended up pretty cool but I can’t imagine the thought process that lead to capturing the launch on a 3DS.
Unsurprisingly this is also today's Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD)
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap260404.html
Very cool
Why is spectacular in quotations? I keep seeing this in headlines, is it because they're quoting a single word?
It's lazy "editorializing"
Yes
It’s a BBC journalistic standards thing; the BBC doesn’t want to express an opinion about the image, they are relaying that as a quote from someone about the image. The word “spectacular” is attributed to NASA in the article.
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...
It's one of those stark reminders that there's no such thing as up or down in space, and something that disabuses me of the notion that I can truly comprehend "the enemy gate is down".
Very cool. Along the same lines the EPIC::DSCOVR mission has been taking photos of the earth since, I believe, around 2015.
https://epic.gsfc.nasa.gov/
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.
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.
Gotta love the sarcastic quotes
WOW!!!!
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.
Good news! We already have that! If you pay taxes to the US that's one of the thing you've helped pay for:
https://www.nesdis.noaa.gov/imagery/satellite-maps
For reasons that are unexplainable if you're the NYTimes, polluting industries have been trying to kill these missions for decades.
It sounds trivial, but perspective shots like this are part of why public support for space programs exists at all
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
Nothing spectacular about it. Except for the obvious degradation of our planet, there isnt anything special about it. Its just our home.
Anyone find the full res version of this ?
Nasa images page is useless. Government work.
They're here: https://www.nasa.gov/gallery/journey-to-the-moon/
Direct link to this image: https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/art002e00019...
"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."
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?
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?
Don’t you see the reflection of the studio lighting in the middle?
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.
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.
This was a fantastic YouTube video on flat earther beliefs from a few years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTfhYyTuT44
Spoiler - they mostly switched to QAnon instead.
"How to Talk to a Science Denier: Conversations with Flat Earthers, Climate Deniers, and Others Who Defy Reason"
https://www.amazon.ca/How-Talk-Science-Denier-Conversations/...
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.
My guess is the answer is: We didn’t really launch Artemis. This is all CG.
Don't pay attention to "authorities," think for yourself.
- Feynman
Oh, wait, in addition to their usual conspiracy theories, now they can also claim that this is AI-generated!
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What a gorgeous sight to behold!
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!
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.
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.
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.
Moonlight is reflected sunlight.
> even though moonlight is often thought of as bluish and sunlight as yellowish!
Is that... true? Sunlight is seen as yellow, of course, but the moon is usually thought of as white.
Thanks. Until you pointed out it's Earth at night, I had no clue what was supposed to be special about this photo (it appeared suspiciously pixelated for something 'high res', and neighbouring pixels seemed to contrast in colour rather than smoothly complementing as most photos do - but I guess that's random patches of city lights being captured by the camera). Cool stuff!
Something I haven't figured out is: what is that yellow/whitish smudge toward the center of the earth? It looks like camera glare or a reflection?
What does it look like to human eyes? Is there enough light for a person up there to see colour, or would it look like black and white (like a moonlit scene on the ground).
Same! I mean the last time we were in space the cameras were ... not this good. I can't wait to see more photos from modern hardware!
The camera is compensating for extremely low light, so you end up with something that looks closer to a daylight exposure
> The image, titled Hello, World
A new hello.jpg?
wait why is it round?
The shot is from directly above the disc and the great turtle is hidden beneath it.
It's not really round, it's just a lens aberration.
I object to being included in this image without a model release and demand that pixel be removed.
Tell the world you're REALLY fat without telling the world ...
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.
Bad news, I was across town and I do consent to my pixel being used, so you're outta luck
Now I'm wondering about how many people per pixel?
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.
It's the night-side Earth, taken at a high ISO value to keep shutter speed fast to prevent blur.
No, it's BBC's compression of that image.
Look at the original: https://www.nasa.gov/image-detail/fd02_for-pao/
It's grainy, but the detail is terrific.
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
Faking a trip to the moon does call for some fake imagery, otherwise why even bother?
It sure does. But this trip is real. As was Apollo.
whats different between this and all the other pics of earth from various space devices
This is the night side.
Taken by a different camera, from a different location, at a different time.
It’s taken by a human on the way to the moon.
I saw someone point out on reddit that this probably the first digital picture of the whole earth (well, 1 side of it) taken by a person
Apollo used film and it's been a long time since anyone has gone past LEO
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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]
[0] https://old.reddit.com/user/astro_pettit
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42701645
Hello again dot.
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. — Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994
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...
Thanks! This was my first question.
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.
Before Lightroom it might have looked closer to this: https://images-assets.nasa.gov/image/art002e000193/art002e00...
https://exifinfo.org/detail/RjJtDLtCfS5kpq0fM2e7yA
...
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.
Nice. It would've been cool to see what the location information in the EXIF looked like, if it were there.
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.
250 ms f/4 ISO 512000 in case anyone was wondering. I wonder if they applied any denoise, it looks great for such high ISO
Any GPS data? I wonder if it would pick anything up. Altitude reading would be interesting!
Yes, the D5s are the 'official' Handheld Universal Lunar Cameras (HULCs), but (a?) Z9 also got on-board at the 'last minute' (which means two years ago):
https://petapixel.com/2026/04/02/a-nikon-z9-made-it-aboard-t...
They have a thermal blanket for exterior work:
https://petapixel.com/2026/02/24/artemis-ii-astronauts-will-...
https://petapixel.com/2025/01/10/the-custom-nikon-z9-and-the...
Various stories with the "Artemis" tag: https://petapixel.com/tag/artemis/
The D5 has been used on the ISS, including EVAs, since 2017, so they're a known quantity:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cameras_on_the_Interna...
The Mercury and Apollo missions used Hasselblad 500-series-based cameras (modified):
https://www.hasselblad.com/about/history/hasselblad-in-space...
It also seems like very little was done in Lightroom.
This is consistent with good photographic technique that prioritizes "getting it right in the camera."
Wild. I saw a quick glance and assumed the Z9 but the D5 is near the peak of the DSLR world so I guess.
The EXIF data says that the picture was taken with the flash off!
How did they get the Earth to light up when it is obviously dark outside? Is this fake?
Almost 6 decades later, Omega still has a firm hold on NASA by the wrist. https://www.gearpatrol.com/watches/omega-speedmaster-artemis...
It's fun to think about tile dilation per the exif captured Create Date: "2026:04:03 00:27:39.26". I know it's negligible over the trip, but when they took it, was their time really "2026:04:03 00:27:39.25"?
Why 'spectacular' the quotes
I'm sad not alive at a time like Cowboy Bebop oh well, this is a great pic, overview effect
They are quoting NASA.
[unexplained loss of data]
That’s peak British journalism to have everything in quotes. I’m surprised they didn’t write “allegedly spectacular”.
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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
Especially if they knew the sad state of the world whence the rocket was fired from, almost as a distraction of the decay of modern society mankind faces because of their fancy tech and the madmen it enables. I used to be fan of all space tech related stuff, but to me it has lost a lot of its shine. The people of old may say "hey, it is just like Easter island, except their monuments are dedicated to the God of Tech".
I love the fact that you can see the aurora at both poles!
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.
I like the non brightened version, where you can clearly see the light coming from cities. How cool would it be if we saw similar on another planet...
I may be mistaken but there's even atmosphere visible - that tiny translucent band on the darker photo
It almost looks like the Earth has a subtle glow around it
It took me a while to orient myself on that picture, until I realized where Spain is... :)
Does there exist a camera that can zoom into a single person from this distance?
Nope, not today that can be easily brought in space. Plus the atmosphere interfering.
Relevant XKCD "what if?" [0] is relevant.
[0] - https://what-if.xkcd.com/32/
What clearance level do you have?
Can't decide if this is "MOEAGARE ARUCHIMISU" moment or a "Transcending Time" moment.
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...
It disappoints me greatly they're not raw :(
truly stunning picture
Can I see the thin band of atmosphere?
It really just is a blue marble floating in nothingness.
Where's Antarctica?
Just behind the horizon somewhere on the top right, or maybe some of those clouds are already it.
You can see for yourself in Google Maps if you enable the globe view, unfortunately it seems I can't share a direct link.
This is exactly what I need for printing as 14x10 4x6 photos stitched together!
this ought to put flat-earthers completely down. :)
If you're confused what you're looking at, turn it upside down.
West Africa & Gibraltar strait
Imagine that all our joys, problems and attachments are within that blue sphere
Can we confirm the cloud patterns match weather data from the same time? Might be a good way to verify.
Verify what?
No, that part of NASA was defunded.
"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)
Technically correct, the best kind of correct. After all, the moon is in Earth's orbit.
Theyre travelling to a region of space where the moons gravity is more important than the earths though. I think that counts
> It is the first time since 1972 that humans have travelled outside of the Earth's orbit.
They mean outside of low Earth orbit (which basically means further away than the ISS). The phrasing is not ideal.
> Earth's gravitational dominance extends 4x the distance to the moon
"Earth's gravitational dominance" is not a single thing; it depends on what kind of "dominance" you're talking about.
For example, even though the Moon is usually described as being in orbit about the Earth, its orbit is always concave towards the Sun. In other words, its net gravitational acceleration is always towards the Sun--even when the Earth is on the other side of it from the Sun. So by this criterion it's not in orbit about the Earth, it's in orbit about the Sun, doing a complicated do-si-do with the Earth, also in orbit about the Sun.
I'm not sure what definition of "dominance" you're using that extends the Earth's "dominance" to 4 times the distance of the Moon.
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.
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.
And they can be found online pretty easily: https://himawari8.nict.go.jp/.
I remember there's some tools to use the images as desktop backgrounds: https://github.com/boramalper/himawaripy
I remember watching grainy B+W ones in the 80s via a dish. It might have been a slow scan signal back then? It blew my mind watching the Earth live as a disk, seeing the weather in realtime.
to quote the old meme:
> hey, i'm in a picture with all my friends!
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...
https://youtu.be/ZWSvHBG7X0w
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.
I had a similar thought at first, and then remembered the steady technical progress of the Shuttle era (at least from my recollection).
I get that feeling, but I think a lot of the "texture" we remember is really just the limitations of the tech at the time
Did they mount my Canon 7D to the outside? :D reminds me of the familiar grain haha
Literally a wasteful distraction from more important things
How are people still flat-earthers after stuff like this
Because without the network effect of adequate education, scientific understanding doesn't scale.
What does scale, unfortunately, is arrant nonsense.
Maybe I'm just a dumb optimist, but I've always assumed that the flat earthers started out as an enteraining debate club intentionally trying to prove something impossible just for the challenge, which got overtaken by a tiny number of vocal idiots. I have heard they largely have moved on to Qanon, which tracks.
You can't claim to have superior knowledge if you admit you're wrong.
This photo could be easily faked. I don't believe the Earth is flat, but I also don't think everybody on the planet should be 100% on one side of a discussion. Even if flat-earthers are kinda dumb, I think it's worse to force everyone into intellectual submission just because you're "right".
I'm pretty sure people claim to be flat-earthers as a lark.
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They aren't, what you see is a combination of trolls and propagandists; very few real human beings actually believe in such things.
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".
I was thinking the same thing, but then I decided to embrace the frustration of the image. It's reminding us that the pictures we have in our heads are kind of fragile. They don't prepare us for a live encounter with Earth from some random angle in space.
I asked a different question in my mind, who says it "appears to us as upside down"? I would think if you lived in Patagonia, the south pole is "up".
I personally prefer to view it in the same orientation the photographer saw it in their viewfinder. Makes me feel more like I’m inside the vessle looking at the planet.
If you live in the southern hemisphere most pictures of the Moon that you see online look upside down compared to ones that you take yourself.
To paraphrase Carl Sagan: insignificant plant in an insignificant galaxy and there’s a good chance we’ll annihilate ourselves.
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?
1972 -> taken during daytime 2026 -> taken during nightime
> Surely our camera gear is exponentially better now
They are better, but not exponentially. You can't beat physics, film cameras can still compete in terms of dynamic range and resolution, the optical elements haven't changed that much. The 1972 photo was taken on medium format film, which is twice the size of the sensor area in the modern one, which means more photons and less noise. The recent image was take at a really high ISO, which adds to the noisiness.
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?
I think the clocks on board Orion are set to Houston time, which would be 5 hours behind UTC (because of Daylight Saving). But I'm not sure. I would expect the EXIF time to be in whatever time zone the spacecraft's clocks are set to.
> clocks tick slower under the moon's weaker gravity. (Or is it faster?)
Compared to clocks at rest on Earth, clocks on board Orion right now are ticking faster, because it's at a high enough altitude above the Earth that the faster ticking due to higher altitude outweighs the slower ticking due to speed relative to the Earth.
That will be true for most of the mission. For clocks in orbit about the Earth, the "breakeven point" where the altitude effect and the speed effect cancel out and the clock ticks at the same rate as an Earth clock is at, IIRC, about 1.5 Earth radii. So clocks on the ISS, for example, tick slower than Earth clocks; but clocks on the GPS satellites (orbiting at 4.2 Earth radii) tick faster (and there is an adjustment made for this on each satellite so that the time signals they send out match Earth clock rates).
For a spacecraft moving at escape velocity, which is going to be roughly true for Orion all the way until splashdown, I think the "breakeven point" is higher, at a little over 2 Earth radii. Orion will reach that point on the way back a few hours before splashdown, I think.
The Moon's gravity well is too shallow to make an appreciable difference in any of these calculations.
I should emphasize that all these tick rate effects are tiny, on the order of one part in a billion to one part in a hundred billion. Even when you add up the difference over the entire mission, it's still only on the order of hundreds of microseconds (i.e., the astronauts end up aging a few hundred microseconds more than people who stayed on Earth).
Line 30 of the exif dump in the gist linked above gives an offset of -05:00
Once video models get better, hope we can also see some videos.
here the original NASA photos at high resolution without unnecessary ads.
https://www.nasa.gov/gallery/journey-to-the-moon/
https://artemis-tracker.netlify.app/
https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/hello-world/
That picture of the "dark" Earth is most fascinating because everyone has seen a million images of Earth before, but how many have seen it in this view. The image by itself says a little about the Earths place in the planetary system.
A beautiful reminder of what's possible with photography when you're using more than a comparatively crappy iPhone Pro Max camera. (Oh and taking the shot from Outer Space.)
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?
just curious to know why is there no dark on opposite side if sun is another side?
This is all we've got. We need to do a better job of preserving it.
Unfortunately that would affect shareholder value.
One of the objectives of the Artemis missions is to prepare for Mars travel, none of the objectives of Artemis are to view Earth as the only planet we have nor to preserve it.
Finally: Yes, global warming is real, but the threat is different. I predict that we will far exceed the average increase in global average temperature, but we will survive. Yes, we will survive, but with some "scars".
Where are the turtles?
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.
https://www.rxjourney.net/30-things-i-know
>The burn took the Orion spacecraft out of Earth orbit...
No it didn't. That would be catastrophic and likely fatal. They are going to the Moon, which is also in Earth orbit.
I often think about what an amazing time it is to be alive and how amazing all the tech we have at our fingertips is. But I am also incredibly saddened by the fact that I was probably born just shy of routine space travel. I can not even imagine how amazing it would be to look down on earth and see it in its entirety. Hopefully my kids or my grandkids will be able to achieve my dream and do exactly that.
If you had routine space travel, you would be upset that you can't time travel.
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.
NASA confirmed it is Venus, yeah.
Why is the old image so much more blue? Did pollution increase cause this change in color over time?
One was taken during daylight on film, which needs to be processed and scanned, the other one was taken at high ISO during night time on a digital camera.
So much interpretation is done on colour on each step of the way that it's not surprising the colours are looking different.
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.
What a mad idea.
The aesthetic ended up pretty cool but I can’t imagine the thought process that lead to capturing the launch on a 3DS.
Unsurprisingly this is also today's Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD)
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap260404.html
Very cool
Why is spectacular in quotations? I keep seeing this in headlines, is it because they're quoting a single word?
It's lazy "editorializing"
Yes
It’s a BBC journalistic standards thing; the BBC doesn’t want to express an opinion about the image, they are relaying that as a quote from someone about the image. The word “spectacular” is attributed to NASA in the article.
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...
It's one of those stark reminders that there's no such thing as up or down in space, and something that disabuses me of the notion that I can truly comprehend "the enemy gate is down".
Very cool. Along the same lines the EPIC::DSCOVR mission has been taking photos of the earth since, I believe, around 2015.
https://epic.gsfc.nasa.gov/
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.
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.
Gotta love the sarcastic quotes
WOW!!!!
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.
Good news! We already have that! If you pay taxes to the US that's one of the thing you've helped pay for:
https://www.nesdis.noaa.gov/imagery/satellite-maps
For reasons that are unexplainable if you're the NYTimes, polluting industries have been trying to kill these missions for decades.
It sounds trivial, but perspective shots like this are part of why public support for space programs exists at all
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
Nothing spectacular about it. Except for the obvious degradation of our planet, there isnt anything special about it. Its just our home.