The Best Artemis II MOON IMAGES (UPDATED)

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]10 days, four astronauts, one spacecraft called Integrity, and somewhere around 10,000 photographs that the entire internet spent two weeks trying to process. Between April 1st and April 10th of 2026, NASA's Aremis 2 mission became the first crude lunar flight since Apollo 17 came home in December 1972.

[00:00:24]over 53 years of nobody getting near the moon and then suddenly Reed Wisman, Victor Glover, Christina and Jeremy Hansen were out there at the Orion spacecraft window shooting deep space through a Nikon D5 like tourists with the best camera kit in human history. Most of the coverage just shows you the highlight reel. Eclipse shot, Earth set shot, boom, done, move on. But that flattens the mission into five images when the real story is a 10-day journey that had something completely different to show you every single day.

[00:00:57]So that's what this video is. All 10 days of the Artemis 2 mission, one at a time through the photos the crew actually took. Launch, deep space transit, the flyby, the long trip home, splashdown in the Pacific. Every day got its own moment. Every day produced something worth seeing. Let's go. Quick context before we start the countdown.

[00:01:19]The Orion spacecraft on this mission had a total of 32 cameras aboard. 17 of those were handheld units for the crew to grab as needed. The gear list is genuinely wild. Nikon D5 professional DSLRs from 2016. A newer Nikon Z9 mirrorless camera. GoPro Hero4 Blackaction cameras that are over a decade old at this point. and four iPhone 17 Pro Max smartphones, one per crew member. Space agencies pick proven hardware over new hardware, which is why the flagship camera of humanity's return to the moon was a DSLR you can find used on eBay. The iPhone was the weird new kid in the group. The Nikon was the veteran. Both of them flew. Everything those cameras captured made it home through a laser communication system called O2O, which stands for Orion Artemis 2 optical communication system.

[00:02:14]Peak capability of 260 megabits per second, which is roughly home fiber internet speeds, except the fiber in this case was an infrared beam crossing empty space between the spacecraft and a receiver dish in Alas Cru's, New Mexico.

[00:02:29]Every single image you are about to see rode home on a beam of light.

[00:02:35]Day one, April 1st, 2026. Liftoff happened at 6:35 p.m. Eastern time from Kennedy Space Center launch complex 39B.

[00:02:45]The SLS rocket, the Space Launch System, pushed four astronauts off the planet on a 63 ft wingspan spacecraft with solar arrays that would deploy fully about an hour into flight. Photographers on the ground captured the pillar of orange flame punching through Florida humidity at sunset. That's the defining day one image. SLS at 39B lit from underneath the whole pad drowning in thrust.

[00:03:10]But the interesting part of day one happened after they reached space. About 7 hours after launch, Victor Glover took manual control of Orion from the left seat and handflew the spacecraft through a proximity operations demonstration with the spent upper stage of the rocket.

[00:03:27]The interim cryogenic propulsion stage, ICPS for short, was tumbling away from Orion, and Glover flew the capsule around it by hand. This was the first time an American had manually piloted a spacecraft in deep space since the Apollo program, no autopilot, no computer nudging, just a crew member with a joystick flying a car-sized capsule around a school bus-sized rocket stage in orbit. The screen grabs from Inside Integrity that evening show Glover and Wisemen silhouetted against the Earth's crescent through the window while Glover flew. Day one set the tone.

[00:04:05]This was a hands-on crew, not a passive one. Day two, April 2nd, wakeup song was Sleepy Head by Young and Sick, which KO picked because every NASA mission still does the wakeup song tradition going back to Gemini. Classic. The big event of day 2 was the trans lunar injection burn TLI. At 7:49 p.m. Eastern, the service module's main engine fired for 5 minutes and 50 seconds, gave Orion roughly 1,274 ft pers of extra velocity, and punched the spacecraft out of Earth orbit for good. 6 minutes later, Artemis I was the first crude vehicle to leave Earth orbit since Apollo 17, 9,000 m out, climbing fast. And that is the moment Reed Wisman shot the photo called Hello World. Look at this image. Earth as a thin illuminated crescent against deep space.

[00:04:59]The night side of the planet glowing faintly. The Sahara Desert and the Iberian Peninsula visible along the lit edge. Twin auroras wrapping both polar regions in green. And in the bottom right corner of the frame, a bright pinpoint of light which is actually the planet Venus looking like a lost star.

[00:05:18]The technical specs matter here. Nikon D5 camera, AFS NOR 14 to 24mm lens at 22 mm f4, a/4 second exposure, ISO 51,200.

[00:05:32]That ISO number alone makes this photo impossible to have captured during Apollo. Apollo shot on Kodak film that maxed out around ISO 160. Wiseman was shooting at over 300 times the light sensitivity of any Apollo camera. This photo could not have existed before digital photography. It's the first full night Earth crescent ever captured from beyond low Earth orbit. Apollo astronauts looked out their windows and saw this exact view. They just couldn't photograph it. Wise men could and did.

[00:06:06]Day three, April 3rd. Wake up song was In a Daydream by the Freddy Jones band, which is perfect because Day three was essentially the calm middle of the outbound trip, halfway to the moon, 99,900 m from Earth, 161,750 mi from the moon, cruising. NASA officially released the Hello World photo to the public on this day. The internet did what the internet does with a great space image. Instant wallpaper for millions of phones. News coverage everywhere. Comparisons to the 1972 blue marble shot from Apollo 17 flooded every space news site. The other story from day three was smaller but cooler.

[00:06:50]Orion's O2 laser communication system connected with both ground stations on Earth simultaneously for the first time.

[00:06:58]one in New Mexico and one in California.

[00:07:02]Highdefinition video down linked at rates that would have been completely impossible with traditional radio communications. This was not in the headlines, but in the engineering world, day three was when NASA proved that deep space internet was basically here. The first outbound trajectory correction burn was actually cancelled on day three. Orion was already flying such a precision trajectory that the engineers at Johnson Space Center decided to skip the planned 8-second correction. The spacecraft was threading the needle through space on almost pure ballistic aim. Two of the three planned outbound correction burns would ultimately go unused, which says something about how dialed in the trajectory math was from launch. The cabin tableau frame from day three shows Glover, Hansen, and Wiseman working shoulder-to-shoulder at the instrument panels. Three astronauts in a row is a rare framing because most crew shots were either two people or all four. This is one of the few images from the whole mission where you see three crew members in deep space, each focused on a separate task at the same console.

[00:08:09]Lorie Glaze, NASA's acting associate administrator for exploration systems, made an official statement that day, saying that for the first time since Apollo 17 in 1972, humans had departed Earth orbit. Reed, Victor, Christina, and Jeremy were officially on a precise trajectory toward the moon. Day four, April 4th, wakeup song was Pink Pony Club by Chapel Ran. Reed Wisman picked that one, which again is the kind of detail that tells you these are real people with real music taste, not corporate astronauts from the 80s.

[00:08:47]Position at Wake was 169,000 mi from Earth. Closing on the moon at roughly 110,700 m out. The day's main activity was a 41-minute manual piloting demonstration, but this time by Christina Ko and Jeremy Hansen. Each of them took control of the spacecraft in deep space and tested both the six degrees of freedom thruster mode and the 3° of freedom mode. Hands-on flying thousands of miles from the nearest safety net. Handling qualities data for the engineers back home. But the image everyone remembers from day four is a crew selfie shot using a camera mounted at the tip of one of Integrity's solar array wings. It shows Koke in her blue flight suit smiling at the lens with a small round plush object floating in the background next to her.

[00:09:42]That round plush object is Rise. And Rise is the best story nobody covered enough. Every crude space mission picks a zerog indicator, a small object that starts floating the moment the spacecraft reaches microgravity. It's symbolic, but it's also functional. When the cruise mascot starts floating on camera, mission control knows you've officially arrived in zerog. Apollo 11 flew a plush mouse. So use crews pick toys often chosen by their kids. For Artemis II, the crew chose a plush mini moon wearing an earththemed baseball cap. Designed by an eight-year-old named Lucas Yei from Mountain View, California, Yay's design won NASA's Zero Gravity Indicator Design Challenge out of 2,65 entries from kids across the country.

[00:10:30]And Rise contains a micro SD card with approximately 5.6 million names from NASA's Send Your Name with Artemis campaign. So, when you see that little round plush moon floating in the background of these crew photos, it's carrying the names of 5 million people to the actual moon. The 8-year-old kid designed the mascot of humanity's return to the lunar vicinity. That's the story.

[00:10:56]Day five, April 5th. Wake Up came around 11:50 a.m. Eastern to Workingclass Heroes by CeeO Green, followed by a recorded audio message from Charlie Duke, Apollo 16 moon walker, 60-year handoff, the 10th man to walk on the moon, telling the Artemis two crew basically, good luck. The main activity of day five was the orange suit demonstration. All four crew members dawned their bright orange Orion crew survival system suits, pressurized them, tested seals, ate and drank through the helmet ports, and moved around in the suits inside the cabin. The photos from this day look like a pastel colored sci-fi film. Four astronauts in identical bright orange floating in a white capsule running drills. If something had gone wrong, these suits were rated to keep them alive for six days without cabin pressure. Then at 12:41 a.m. Eastern on April 6th, so technically rolling into day 6, Orion crossed the lunar sphere of gravitational influence. The moon's gravity began pulling harder on the spacecraft than Earth's gravity did. Ko radioed to Houston saying, "We are now falling to the moon rather than rising away from Earth. It is an amazing milestone." And if you think about that sentence for a second, it is quietly poetic. Falling to the moon. A quarter million miles of falling into another world's pole. Day six, April 6th, the flyby. This is the biggest day of the mission. So strap in because this section is longer. If you're enjoying this breakdown so far, hit subscribe. I do these kinds of day-by-day space mission deep dives every time there's a major flight. Now, the flyby day wakeup song was Good Morning by Mandisa and Toby Mack, swapped in by Victor Glover's wife as a surprise. Glover later said on the radio he didn't know she was going to do that. The crew also heard a recorded message from Jim Levelvel, commander of Apollo 8 and Apollo 13, recorded shortly before his death in August 2025.

[00:13:03]Levelvel's voice greeted the Artemis 2 crew as they approached the moon, saying, "Welcome to the old neighborhood." The crew carried Levelvel's actual Apollo 8 silk patch with them through the entire mission. At 1:56 p.m. Eastern, Orion crossed the distance record set by Apollo 13 in 1970, humanity's farthest ever distance from Earth, beaten live on television.

[00:13:28]Hansen made a formal statement over the radio calling the Aremis 2 crew stewards of a record that they hoped would not stand for long because that would mean humans had gone farther.

[00:13:39]The 7-hour lunar observation window opened at 2:45 p.m. And for the next 7 hours, the Artemis 2 crew produced roughly 10,000 photographs. Do the math.

[00:13:49]One photo every 2 and 1/2 seconds, non-stop for 7 hours. Four people, 17 cameras rotating through positions at Integrity's windows. Groundbased scientists at Johnson Space Center in Houston were radioing up specific observation targets in real time. Look at the terrain around Oriental. Focus on the shadows across Vavalof Crater. Can you see those bright rays from Glushko?

[00:14:14]At 6:41 p.m. Eastern, Ko and Wiseman shot the Earth set photo cataloged as AR 002e00287 in the NASA archive. You have seen this one. Muted blue crescent Earth sinking behind the cratered edge of the lunar surface. The day side of Earth visible over Australia and Oceanania. In the foreground, M crater with its terrace walls and central peaks. Artnet compared it directly to the Apollo 8 Earthrise.

[00:14:43]Three minutes after that photo was taken, at 6:44 p.m., Integrity lost signal with Earth as it passed behind the moon. 40 minutes of total radio silence. Four human beings on the far side of another world with no one able to reach them. Glover's last transmission before the blackout. We're still going to feel your love from Earth. We love you from the moon. We will see you on the other side. At 700 p.m., Integrity reached closest approach, 4,67 mi above the lunar surface, traveling at over 60,000 mph relative to Earth. Peak distance from Earth came at 7:02 p.m., 252,756 mi out. That is the farthest any human being has ever traveled from Earth. In that single moment, Christina became the farthest traveled woman in human history. Victor Glover became the first person of color to loop the moon.

[00:15:37]Jeremy Hansen became the first Canadian ever to fly beyond low Earth orbit.

[00:15:43]Wiseman became the oldest person to venture beyond low Earth orbit. Four records broken in one heartbeat. At 7:22 p.m. Eastern, Earthrise. Image Arts 02E21278 in the NASA catalog shot with a 400 millimeter telephoto lens through Integrity's window. Crescent Earth re-emerging above the lunar horizon after 40 minutes of silence. The framing was deliberate. The Aremis 2 crew had trained for this shot specifically knowing the world would compare it to Bill Anders 1968 Apollo 8 Earthrise.

[00:16:17]They wanted the echo. They got it. Then came the eclipse. The alignment of Orion, moon, and sun produced a total solar eclipse lasting nearly 54 minutes.

[00:16:27]From the crews perspective, the moon appeared five times larger than the sun in the sky. 54 minutes of totality.

[00:16:34]Earth-based eclipses last 2 or 3 minutes at best, and Artemis II watched the sun disappear behind the moon for nearly an hour. The photograph from this event shows a completely dark lunar disc haloed by the glowing solar corona with actual stars punctuating the black sky and Venus glinting as a silver pin prick at the lunar limb. Saturn, Mars, and Mercury were also visible in various frames. Four planets in one eclipse picture along with the moon and the sun's corona. That combination is impossible to capture from Earth. During that eclipse, the dark lunar surface lit up with tiny white flashes. Meteoroid impacts. The crew counted six visible to the naked eye strikes during the observation window. Each flash lasted a millisecond. White shifting to bluish white, a pin prick of light as Hansen described it. The science team at Johnson erupted into what Artemis II lunar science lead Dr. Kelsey Young called audible screams of delight when the crew started calling out impact flashes in real time. A handful of meteoroids hit the moon every day.

[00:17:39]Nobody had ever confirmed them live.

[00:17:41]from a crude spacecraft with the naked eye. Artemis the 2 did it six times in one night. And then quietly before the flyby window closed, the crew proposed two crater names. One they called Integrity after the spacecraft. The other they called Carol. Carol was the name of Reed Wisman's wife. She died of cancer in 2020 at 46 years old, leaving Wisemen and their two daughters. Jeremy Hansen, visibly emotional, made the announcement over the radio, explaining that Carol was being proposed for a bright spot crater on the near far side boundary, meaning it would be visible from Earth during certain lunar librations. Wise men's daughters could point a telescope at their mother's crater someday. The name still need International Astronomical Union approval, which historically takes years. Apollo 8 proposed Mount Marilyn for Jim Levelvel's wife in 1968, and it wasn't made official until 2017, 49 years later. But whether or not the paperwork comes through, Carol has a name now, and she will have a name for the next several billion years. That was day six. 11 record- setting moments, one human tribute, six meteoroid flashes, 10,000 photographs, and an eclipse longer than most marriages.

[00:19:02]Day seven, April 7th. Wake up was Tokyo drifting by glass animals and Denzel Curry. Position was 36,000 m from the moon, heading home and rising fast because Orion was accelerating back toward Earth. The crew held a debrief with the Johnson Space Center science team while every detail of the flyby was still fresh. Correction burn at 8:03 p.m. 15 seconds long. Just a small nudge to fine-tune the return trajectory. But the photograph from day 7 that made it everywhere was a group hug. Image art 002 E013365 in the archive. Four astronauts floating in a circle inside Integrity's cabin, arms around each other. Rise the plush moon floats nearby watching. They had just become the first crew to photograph the far side of the moon in over half a century. And they celebrated it by holding each other mid orbit. Ko later said in a press conference that the thing they would miss most about the mission was each other. They had been training together as a four-person crew for three years. That photo is the emotional heart of the mission, not the eclipse, not the Earthrise. Four people, one hug, rise floating beside them with the moon framed in the window behind them.

[00:20:22]Meanwhile, far below them on Earth, the recovery ship for the mission, the USS John P. Murtha was departing Naval Base San Diego to pre-position itself in the Pacific. Navy divers from Explosive Ordinance Disposal Group 1 and MH60s.

[00:20:38]Seahawk helicopters from Squadron HSC23 call sign Wildcards were already on deck. While the crew was hugging each other in lunar orbit, the Navy was sailing out to meet them where they would come down 3 days later. Day seven was also the one scheduled rest day of the entire mission. After the flyby debrief and the correction burn, Houston gave the crew a clean evening. Sleep in zero gravity. Listen to music. Look out the window at the moon receding in the distance. This is probably the closest any astronaut has come to actual vacation since the Gemini era. 12 hours of scheduled nothing in deep space with the best view in the solar system.

[00:21:21]Day 8, April 8th. Wakeup was under pressure by Queen and David Bowie with a recorded message from the Canadian Space Agency for Jeremy Hansen. Position was 200,278 mi from Earth. Accelerating home, the crew ran through the orthostatic intolerance garment checkout. That is a pressure compensation sleeve worn under the suit to keep blood flowing properly during the gravity shift on re-entry.

[00:21:48]One of those quiet engineering details that nobody covers, but it's literally what keeps astronauts from fainting when Earth's gravity returns.

[00:21:57]The Day 8 media call at 9:45 p.m.

[00:22:00]produced the Wiseman quote that went viral. He talked about sealing the micro SD card with the 5.6 million names into Rise's pocket before launch. And he said, "Zipping that little pocket on the bottom of Rise was the moment that put it all together for me. 60-year-old fighter pilot, former astronaut choked up on live television talking about a plush mini moon. That is the mission in one sentence.

[00:22:28]Day nine, April 9th. Wake up was Lonesome Drifter by Charlie Crockett.

[00:22:34]Position was 147,337 mi from Earth. Day nine was all about prep, stowing cargo, removing cabin netting, installing the re-entry seats, running through re-entry procedures, weather briefings for the splashdown zone. The crew was packing up the cabin like you pack up an AIRBNB the night before checkout, except the AIRBNB is in deep space.

[00:22:59]Return trajectory correction. Two fired at 10:53 p.m. Eastern, 9 seconds, 5.3 ft per second of delta V. That was the final major burn before the entry maneuver. After this, Orion was committed to the ballistic trajectory back into Earth's atmosphere.

[00:23:17]Day 10, April 10th, splashdown day. Wake up was a double feature run to the water by Live and Free by Zack Brown Band.

[00:23:25]Chosen deliberately for the day the Artemis 2 crew would run to the actual Pacific Ocean. The symbolism was not subtle. Final trajectory correction burn at 2:53 p.m. Eastern. Service module jettison at 7:33. Entry interface at 7:53 p.m. 400,000 ft altitude. Ballistic capsule plunging into Earth's upper atmosphere at 24,000 mph, roughly Mach 33. 6 minutes of communications blackout as the plasma sheath around Integrity's heat shield blocked all radio signals.

[00:23:57]The heat shield surface hit 3,000° F.

[00:24:01]Drove parachutes deployed at 8:03 p.m.

[00:24:04]Three main parachutes deployed a minute later at 6,000 ft, slowing integrity to roughly 17 m hour. Splashdown at 8:07 p.m. Eastern time, 50:07 Pacific, off the coast of San Diego, California. The capsule landed upright. NASA commentator Rob Nva said on air, "This is a perfect descent for integrity." Recovery teams from the USS John P. Murtha, a Navy amphibious transport dock stationed in the Pacific, deployed within minutes.

[00:24:37]Navy divers from Explosive Ordinance Disposal Group 1 swam to the capsule.

[00:24:42]MH60s Seahawk helicopters from squadron HSC23 call sign Wildcards hovered nearby.

[00:24:49]Inflatable front porch collars were deployed around the capsule. Ko egressed first, then Glover, then Hansen, then Wiseman, the commander, last out. One by one, they were hoisted into helicopters and flown to the deck of Murtha, where the recovery team applauded them off the aircraft. Wiseman was photographed hugging flight surgeon Richard Shuring on the flight deck. Ko and Glover sat shoulder-to-shoulder inside the Seahawk on the ride over. Riseze came home with them. 5.6 6 million names floated back down to Earth inside a plush moon inside a space capsule from space. Mission complete. The final numbers are worth saying out loud. 9 days 1 hour 32 minutes of flight time. Roughly 694,000 mi traveled. Maximum distance from Earth of 252,756 mi, beating Apollo 13's old record by over 4,000 mi. closest lunar approach of 4,67 miles. Approximately 10,000 photos taken during the flyby alone with hours of 4K video still aboard Integrity waiting to be processed. All of it down linked through a laser the size of a shoe box. And here is the detail that ties it together. Apollo went to the moon six times. Artemis the 2 did not land. But Artemis 2 brought back something Apollo could not. Realtime highdefinition imagery of our return to the moon shot on professional cameras transmitted on beams of light watched live by billions of people on six different streaming platforms. Artemis the coup was not about landing. It was about seeing. 10 days, four astronauts, one plush moon, two proposed crater names, six meteoroid flashes, one eclipse, and roughly 10,000 photographs that will define how humanity remembers the return to lunar space. The next mission, Artemis III, is currently planned to put astronauts back on the lunar surface in the coming years. When they do, they will be taking pictures with a modified Nikon Z9, the same camera that flew on this flight. So, the Artemis 2 cameras did not just document the mission, they qualified the hardware that will photograph the first boots on the moon since 1972.

[00:27:05]If you want to come with me through that mission when it launches, hit subscribe.

[00:27:10]I will break it down day by day just like this. Every new NASA flyby, every new deep space mission, zooming into the photos that everyone else scrolls past.

[00:27:22]Thanks for watching. See you on the next one.