From the EXIF we can infer that every setting was left at the default. No exposure comp, no contrast, no HSL, no lens correction and a linear tone curve. Just the default Adobe Color profile at 5400K.

But that one (art002e000193~large.jpg) is only 287kB. The Lightroom-processed one is 6.2MB. I would expect original to be heavier.

The photograph appears to show nightime on Earth with just a sliver of daytime. Beyond cities in Iberia and along the coast of Africa, most of what we can see would be reflected light from the Moon? We are just past full moon on April 1.

Might I ask, what was your path to finding this image?

Maybe it’s because I (like many) have experienced taking pictures at night and seeing the grainy result that _this_ image struck me as incredibly realistic.

Almost like I ran the grainy-to-real conversion in my mind and I felt like I was imagining seeing this in person. Beautiful image!

> I'd have probably shot it wide open at f/2.8 rather than cranking the ISO up to 51200.

One of the reasons the D5 supposedly was chosen was because of its high dynamic and good low light performance. It can go up to ISO 3,280,000:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikon_D5

The D5 has been used on the ISS, including EVAs, since 2017, so is a known quantity:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cameras_on_the_Interna...

You can get a D5 on amazon.com. It would be amazing if one of the astronauts did a review explaining how it performs in space.

I would imagine since they are not circling the earth, that there will be pull of gravity and the camera would start to move relative to the spacecraft. But may not fast enough for a short exposure

They're in space so they only sort of need to hold the camera.

The D5 doesn't have built in GPS, and adding it requires an attachment. I don't know if the smartphone app works on that model, but it is from the same year as my D5600 which does support it. The app provides GPS but also drains the battery fast. I turned airplane mode on after the first dead battery.

GPS might work out there though: https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/somd/space-communications-...

"The Nikon D5 remains the camera of choice for the Artemis II mission and will be assigned primary photographic duties. It is a proven, highly-tested camera that the Artemis II team knows will excel in the high-radiation environment of space. However, as Artemis II Commander Reid Wiseman explained ahead of yesterday’s launch, he successfully fought to have a single Nikon Z9 added to Artemis II’s manifest."

https://petapixel.com/2026/04/02/a-nikon-z9-made-it-aboard-t...

There are more interesting details in the PetaPixel article, such as: "'That’s the camera that they’ll be using, the crew will be using on Artemis III plus, so we were fighting really hard to get that on the vehicle to test out in a high-radiation environment in deep space,' Wiseman said."

H/t to "SiliconEagle73" who linked to that PetaPixel article in the thread linked below.

https://old.reddit.com/r/nasa/comments/1sbfevm/new_high_reso...

> Wonder why they didn't go for the Z9 which is its modern mirrorless equivalent.

From [0], "The D5 was chosen for its radiation resistance, extreme ISO range (up to 3,280,000), and proven reliability in space." (

[0] https://www.photoworkout.com/artemis-ii-nikon-d5-moon/

They did bring the Z9: https://petapixel.com/2026/04/02/a-nikon-z9-made-it-aboard-t...

But yeah the grainy photo of the Earth with the D5 at ISO 51200 shows the shortcomings of the ancient DSLR. Still, great shot.

Zero point in measuring camera sizes (or other sizes haha) when JWST is floating there.

Government budgets man…

They have a Z9 on board for radiation testing, but the D5 is the primary body for imaging on this mission IIRC

When you're riding a rocket that weighs 3.5 million pounds...

Yeah, it's a reflection from the window.

(To be clear, the bright dots are stars [except the brightest one, in the lower right, is Venus I think], which makes this photo also a great demonstration that of course you can capture stars in space, you just have to expose properly!)

Well one of them is obviously Venus. How did you determine the others weren't stars?

It really is gorgeous. You can see both auroral rings, then there's airglow, and city lights around Gibraltar and on the South American coast, and lightning flashes in the storm clouds over the tropics.

Yeah, it is - unfortunately, it is rather cloudy in my area at the moment. Luckily, the weather was better during the 19./20. January event, which I'll carry forever in my heart.

It is funny if you think about it, imagine you arrive on a planet and there is nothing there, now what. Not saying it is not worth doing but it's like other aspects of life, about the journey. But yeah I think we are lucky to have this ability/get outside of our sandbox. Be aware of the bigger picture.

No GPS coordinates in the EXIF data. Would've been funny.

@dang, mods: maybe this should be the post's link. The image quality is much higher.

Ok thank you, makes more sense, I thought it was the day-side

Haven't any of the space probes taken such pictures as they left to wander through the solar system?

There something amazing about that. Thanks for pointing it out!

The shapes match.

Ridicule them until they leave? Don't really feel like wasting my time on any more than that.

of course they are sore losers

> This is all CG.

Reminds me of the classic - It is true that Spielberg filmed the moon landings, but he was such a perfectionist that he wanted to shoot on location.

Ya, but eventually they all wind up wearing furs and carrying spears as they storm the gates of some government building. Its all good fun until people start to die. We laugh as soveriegn citizens are yanked from thier cars. Harder to watch are the vids of them pulling guns on police.

Conspiracy theorists need to be kept in check. Disengagment is easy but it doesnt help.

> a planet nobody can see exists and is made of x% helium and is y light years away etc etc

Yeah, because this is high-school curriculum.

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/resources/lesson-plan/using-lig...

> with absolute certainty

It is taught that the scientific method provides evidence, not certainty, in middle school science curriculum.

I do not know what you mean about "how wrong they were about Pluto’s appearance".

Since when I was very young and until now the amount of information about Pluto has continuously increased, so now we know much more about it.

For example now we know that Pluto is practically a double planet, having a relatively very large satellite. This was not known when I was a child, e.g. at the time of the first NASA Moon missions.

However, I do not remember anything wrong. Many things that have been learned recently were previously unknown, not wrong.

If you refer to the fact that Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet, that is also a case of information previously unknown, not wrong.

This planetary reclassification was not the first.

When Ceres was discovered in 1801, it was considered the 7th planet, after the 5 planets known in antiquity and Uranus that was discovered a few years earlier. (The chemical elements uranium and cerium, which were discovered soon after the planets, were named so after the new planets, as their discovery impressed a lot the people of those times.)

However, soon after Ceres a great number of other bodies were discovered in the same region and it was understood that Ceres is not a single planet, but a member of the asteroid belt.

Exactly the same thing happened with Pluto, but because of its distance, more years have passed until a great number of bodies have been discovered beyond Neptune and it became understood that Pluto is just one of them, i.e. a member of the Kuiper belt, so it was reclassified, exactly like Ceres.

Your argument is against large generalizations and straw man arguments, and to prove it, you.. use a generalization and straw man argument?

> ...discredit any doubt I have in these extraordinary claims with underwhelming evidence.

Something unfortunate about our media environment is that science news is a dumbed down summary of a dumbed down summary of a dumbed down summary. These issues you're flagging, a lack of evidence and overstated certainty - they're an artifact of the reporting process. If you work your way back to the original sources, there will be a heck of a lot of evidence and it will carry error bars (so the certainty is precisely & appropriately stated). There's bad or even fraudulent papers out there but there's a huge amount of good science being done by honest researchers who are just as concerned as you are about the quality of the evidence and the degree of certainty.

Eg, there really is a compelling explanation of how we can know the composition of a gas giant light-years away, and it isn't invented out of thin air, it's been 100+ year process of understanding spectroscopy and cosmology, building better telescopes, etc. It's the culmination of generations of scientists pushing the field forward millimeter by millimeter.

Do you believe in Antarctica?

Im curious, so the rocket definitely took off, where did it go?

They couldn't do that for "a few bucks of nano banana credits" though. You could generate the imagery but that's only one line of evidence. A launch is easily detectable through multiple signals.

Why would Russia and China and any other country with any degree of astronomic capability that the US has an adversarial relationship with just let them get away with lying to the world? Why wouldn't they take the opportunity to humiliate the US by revealing that no launch happened and that they cannot detect the spacecraft?

South America is visible on the right, and it looks to me like part of North America might also be pictured close to the horizon.

Higher-resolution image: https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/art002e00019...

Thank you. I have having trouble making sense of the orientation. My first thought was misshapen Australia, but where Spain nears Africa is much different than Australia and Tasmania. Also, they forgot New Zealand... while common for maps, I would expect it to show up in a photo.

Thanks I was looking for an orientation comment.

Classic American thinking even from space they are the center of the world smdh

"Your mom is so fat she would take a whole pixel on that image"?

That version is ~~brightened significantly~~ (edit) a longer exposure; I like the darker one better.

https://www.nasa.gov/image-detail/amf-art002e000193/