NASA Just Released the Most Breathtaking Artemis Images — Day by Day

What you are watching now was filmed by a human being, from a window of a spacecraft on the far side of the moon. Not a simulation, not a recreation, a real video in real time, of Earth slowly sinking behind the curved edge of the moon and disappearing from view. Every person who has ever lived on that tiny disk of light, and then it's gone. No human being had ever filmed this before. But the crew of Artemis 2 didn't just film it, they photographed it too. And what they captured is something else entirely. Earth, caught in that final moment, just before it vanishes, the cloud systems still visible, the day side and the night side, both in frame, the ancient cratered lunar surface rising up to swallow it. A photograph that looks like it shouldn't exist. We covered the Artemis 2 mission in early April, the highlights, the images, the eclipse. But NASA has kept releasing material since then, and what's come out deserves its own journey. So today, we're going back to the beginning, day by day, from the moment the rocket left the ground, to the moment Earth vanished behind the moon. You're not watching this from the outside, you're on board. And this is what they saw. At 6.35 in the evening, on the 1st of April, 2026, the space launch system left the ground. And if you've never seen a rocket this size launch in person, photographs don't fully prepare you for what this looks like. This is not a Falcon 9. This is not anything you've seen before. At 322 feet tall, taller than the Statue of Liberty, the SLS is the most powerful rocket ever launched with a crew on board. More powerful than the Saturn V that took humans to the moon in the 1960s. When it ignites, the ground shakes for miles. The whole vehicle weighed 5.75 million pounds, fully fueled, and in over just 8 minutes, it accelerated four human beings to nearly 17,000 miles per hour. 8 minutes. That's all it takes to go from standing on the surface of the Earth, to orbiting it at orbital velocity. 8 minutes of controlled explosion, of engineering so precisely calculated that the margin for error is essentially zero. And then, silence. The engines cut off, the boosters are gone, already splashing down in the Atlantic. The noise disappears, and four people are floating, weightless, in the quiet of low Earth orbit. They're still in Earth's backyard. But the next burn, the one that would matter most, was coming. The translunar injection. The engine firing that would break them free of Earth's orbit entirely, point them toward the moon, and commit them to the journey. And once that burn was done, there was no coming back until the mission was over. Day one was mostly about leaving. The images are of fire and smoke, and a rocket climbing through a Florida sky. But somewhere inside that capsule, as the acceleration pushed four people back into their seats, and Florida disappeared below the clouds, the real journey was just beginning. The translunar injection burn happened in the early hours of April 2nd. A single engine firing, lasting just a few minutes, changed everything. Before it, Earth's gravity still had them. After it, they were free. And the first thing Commander Wiseman did after that burn, was pick up his camera and point it out the window. That first photograph of Earth from deep space on this mission is a quiet one. Earth is still large in the frame. You can see the full disk, the cloud systems, the blue of the oceans. But something has already shifted. You're not looking at Earth the way you see it from the International Space Station, close and familiar. You're looking at it the way you look at something you've just left behind. But it's what happened later that day, that produced the photograph most people couldn't quite believe when they first saw it. As Earth moved between Orion and the Sun, Wiseman pointed the camera out the window again, and what came back was something that generally takes a moment to process. Earth is backlit, the Sun hiding just behind it, and the atmosphere is lit up in a thin glowing arc around the edges. That alone would make it an extraordinary photograph. But then you notice the rest. In the upper right of the frame, and the lower left, two auroras simultaneously visible. And in the lower right corner, so faint you might miss it the first time, is a zodiacal light, a pyramid-shaped glow caused by sunlight scattering off ancient dust spread along the plane of the solar system. Something most people never see in their entire lives, even from the darkest places on Earth, because our skies are simply too bright for it. In one photograph, taken from one window, you can see auroras, zodiacal light, and the full curvature of our planet at the same time. By the end of the day, Earth was already smaller. The crescent Earth image, our planet, reduced to a thin illuminated arc against an absolute blackness, was taken as day two gave way to day three. It looks like a crescent moon, except it's home, and it's getting smaller with every hour. Meanwhile, the crew were pressed against their windows, watching it go. Those images of them, faces turned toward the glass, the glow of Earth reflected in the curved surface of their visors, tells you everything about what day two felt like from inside that capsule. By day three, the distance was starting to show. There's an image from this day taken by a camera mounted on the tip of one of Orion's solar array wings, looking back at the spacecraft from the outside. And there, in the frame, is Orion itself, with the moon hanging in the distance ahead of it. Not a photograph of the destination, not a photograph of home, a photograph of the journey itself. Inside the capsule, the crew had turned the lights off, not because something was wrong, but because they were trying to see. The windows of Orion are good, but any interior light creates glare, and glare gets between you and what's outside. So the cabin went dark, and in that darkness, Christina Koch floated, her face lit only by the soft glow of a screen. While Jeremy Hansen pressed himself into the window frame beside her, peering out in silence at the view beyond. That photograph captures something the technical images never quite do. It captures what it actually felt like to be in that capsule on that day. Two people in the dark, trying to hold on to what was outside their window for as long as they could. And what was outside the window was Earth. But not the Earth of day one. By day three, it had become a sliver. One image from this day shows a thin arc of the illuminated planet against absolute total blackness. That is the entire planet, reduced to a thread of light, because that's how much of it the sun was catching from that angle. At that distance, another image from the same day shows Earth as a crescent, which is genuinely disorienting to look at. We recognize that shape in the sky every month. It has never before been the shape of home. And yet, even as Earth was getting smaller, something else was doing the opposite. The moon, still days away, was growing in the other window. Day three is the day the two worlds were in a kind of balance. One shrinking behind them, one growing ahead. A moment the crew could see both at once, if they turned their heads. And then, gradually, the moon began to win. There's a particular kind of silence that belongs to the middle of a journey. Not the silence of arrival. Not the silence of departure. Just the silence of being between things, past one world, not yet at the other. Nothing outside the windows, but the dark. Days four and five were that silence. There's an image from day four that captures it better than any description could. It was taken by a camera on the tip of one of Orion's solar array wings, pointing back at the spacecraft from the outside. And through one of Orion's windows, you can see Jeremy Hansen, his face pressed to the glass, looking out. From this angle, you're not inside the capsule with him. You're outside, floating in the vacuum, watching a human being through a window somewhere in deep space. Orion is more than halfway to the moon at this point. The nearest ground is hundreds of thousands of kilometers away in every direction. And here is a person, in a window, looking out at exactly where you're standing. By day five, Earth had become something you had to look for. The image from that day shows a crew member at the window. And through the glass, Earth is there, but barely. A thin illuminated arc, still recognizable as home, if you know what you're looking at. Day six was coming, and nothing the crew had seen so far would prepare them for it. But that's the view from up there. Down here, the same planet looks very different. The moment those astronauts splash down and turn on a screen, that single blue marble fractures into a thousand competing headlines. Every outlet covering the same event with its own angle, its own framing, its own blind spots. Which is exactly why I use Ground News. It's a platform that cuts through bias and hype by showing you how different outlets are covering the same story. Political slant, headline framing, and what stories your feed might be missing entirely. For example, when the first images from the Artemis 2 mission were released, I used Ground News to ensure I was reading balanced, credible coverage. I could instantly see the bias distribution was nearly equal, and check each outlet's factuality rating, verified by three independent organizations. And here's a cool detail. The founder is a former NASA engineer, so science coverage is taken seriously. My favorite feature is the blind spot, which flags stories about being disproportionately covered by one side. If you're only interested in topics like science, the interest pages filter out the noise and show you only what matters to you. There's a special offer for viewers of this channel. For limited time, you can subscribe and get 40% off the unlimited access vantage plan by scanning this QR code on screen, or heading to ground.news forward slash SOU. The link is also in the description. Now, back to one of the most stunning images from the mission. Everything the mission had been building toward happened on Day 6. After five days of crossing, the crew of Artemis 2 finally arrived. Orion swept in on a free return trajectory. A carefully calculated path that curved around the lunar far side, using the moon's own gravity, and at its closest point, brought the spacecraft to within 4,000 miles, or 6,500 kilometers, off the surface. Close enough that the moon stopped being a destination in the window, and became a world outside of it. Close enough that you could see individual craters with your naked eye. The crew turned the cabin lights off, the cameras came out, and what followed over the next several hours was one of the most remarkable sustained sequences of human observation in the history of spaceflight. The first images from the observation period show the Oriental Basin, a 600-mile-wide impact scar sitting right on the boundary between the near and far sides of the moon. You can sometimes glimpse it from the Earth if the geometry is perfect, but you have never seen it like this. The center is a dark patch of ancient lava that punched through the lunar crust billions of years ago, and froze solid when it cooled, leaving a permanent dark stain on the surface. Beside it sits another bright crater, sending rays of ejected material stretching outward for 250 miles, or 400 kilometers, in every direction. It's the frozen record of an impact so violent it threw debris across a quarter of the visible lunar surface. Then the Terminator line. This is where lunar photography becomes almost sculptural. The Terminator is the boundary between the sunlit side of the moon and the side in darkness. And because the sun is so low on the horizon from this angle, its light rakes across the surface at a grazing angle, throwing every ridge and crater rim into a sharp relief. Features that are completely invisible under full illumination suddenly reveal themselves as three-dimensional structures. Terraced walls, central peaks, ancient highland terrain that hasn't changed in 3 billion years. And then there's Favalol Crater on the far side, a deep impact scar photographed up close with a clarity that is almost unsettling. Terraced walls dropping in steps to a flat floor, central peaks pushed upward by the rebound of the original collision, a feature that formed in the first seconds of an impact, so energetic that the moon's surface briefly behaved like a liquid before solidifying again. Favalol sits permanently on the far side, facing away from Earth, invisible to every telescope ever pointed at the moon from the ground. It has spent billions of years in complete obscurity. Then came the moment the crew had been anticipating and dreading in equal measure. Earth began to set behind the moon's curved limb, dropping slowly behind the ancient cratered surface. Still blue, still recognizable, still home. And then, a few minutes later, it was gone. Most people will look at this and think of Earthrise, the famous photograph taken by Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders in 1968. Earth rising above the lunar horizon, one of the most iconic images in human history. But this was not Earthrise, this was Earthset. And the difference matters. Earthrise was a moment of revelation, our world appearing, whole and fragile, rising into view. Earthset is quieter. Earth is disappearing, going behind another world, becoming temporarily invisible to the four people watching from their windows as the moon came between them and everything they had ever known. The crew didn't just photograph it, they filmed it. You watch it and the sense of scale hits differently than any photograph. Earth doesn't just disappear in a still image, it moves, it sinks, and then it's gone. And the window is just the moon and the black. After that, the radio went quiet too. Orion crossed to the far side of the moon, the side that permanently faces away from Earth, and when it did, the moon itself blocked every signal between the spacecraft and the ground. No communication can travel through 2200 miles of solid rock. Mission controllers in Houston went silent. There was nothing to do but wait. For nearly 40 minutes, the crew of Artemis II were the most isolated human beings in history. No contact, no signal, no way to reach anyone. Just four people, a spacecraft, and the ancient cratered surface of the lunar far side sliding past their windows in silence. When Orion came back around, contact was restored, and almost immediately, the moon moved between the spacecraft and the sun. What followed was a solar eclipse unlike any human being has ever experienced. On Earth, a total solar eclipse requires you to be standing in a precise, narrow corridor of ground, at exactly the right moment, and even then you get perhaps 7 minutes of totality before the moon moves on. The Artemis crew had 54 minutes, 54 uninterrupted minutes of the sun completely blocked out. The corona blazing in full detail around the dark lunar disk, stars appearing in the sky alongside it, and that bright point of light you can see in the image, that's Venus. Saturn was visible too, further out. From Earth, atmospheric scattering makes it quite difficult to photograph stars during a totality. From Orion, above the moon, there was no atmosphere in the way. The image the crew captured is unlike anything in the history of eclipse photography. The corona, which is the sun's outer atmosphere, is one of the genuine mysteries of solar physics. It is hundreds of times hotter than the sun's visible surface, which makes no sense, and we still don't fully understand why. Scientists have spent decades chasing total eclipses across the Earth's surface to study it for a few precious minutes at a time. The Artemis 2 crew had nearly an hour of it. From above the lunar surface, with equipment designed to document exactly this kind of observation, the scientific data from those 54 minutes is still being analyzed. And then the 54 minutes ended. The sun reappeared from behind the moon, the eclipse was over, day 6 was over, and the crew began the long journey back. But it wasn't just the photographs that made day 6 unforgettable. Just before the Earth set, mission specialist Jeremy Hansen got on the radio to mission control. His voice, normally steady, was thick with emotion. He told them the crew wanted to name two craters they had spotted on the lunar surface. The first after their spacecraft, Integrity. The second after someone they had lost, Carol Taylor Wiseman, the late wife of Commander Reed Wiseman, a neonatal ICU nurse who died of cancer in 2020 at the age of 46. And so we lost a loved one, her name was Carol, the spouse of Reed, the mother of Katie and Ellie. And if you want to find this one, you look at Glushko, and it's just to the northwest of that, at the same latitude as home, and it's a bright spot on the moon. And we would like to call her Carol, and you spell that C-A-R-R-O-L-L. Wiseman was too emotional to speak. The crew floated together in a quiet embrace, tears in their faces. Mission control went silent for nearly a full minute. Then came the reply, Integrity and Carol crater, loud and clear. Carol crater now sits on the moon's near-farside boundary, a bright spot occasionally visible from Earth. The day after the lunar flyby, with the moon receding behind them and Earth still a distant sliver ahead, one of the crew pointed a camera out the window and photographed the Milky Way. And what came back is one of the most humbling images in the entire collection. The Milky Way stretching across the frame in full, 100,000 light-years from one end to the other. From Earth, the Milky Way is difficult to see. You need dark skies, you need patience, and even then, what you get is a faint smear of light across the horizon, a suggestion of the galaxy, rather than the thing itself. From where the Artemis 2 crew was on April 7th, there was no atmosphere in the way, no light pollution, no interference of any kind, just the galaxy, unfiltered, as almost no human has ever seen it. NASA titled this photograph simply, Starstruck. And that feels right. The journey home took three more days. On the 10th of April, Orion's capsule re-entered Earth's atmosphere at nearly 25,000 miles per hour. The heat shield absorbing temperatures comparable to the surface of the sun. And then the parachutes opened over the Pacific. And then, splashdown. And then four people who had been further from Earth than any human in over 50 years were back on the surface of the ocean, recovered, safe, home. The hugs said everything the debrief reports never will. These were not four colleagues completing a mission, these were four people who had shared something irreducible. And who knew, even in that first moment back on Earth, that nothing would ever quite compare to what they had just seen. It was the ending the mission deserved, the kind of ending that lets you exhale. Perhaps some of you were born too late to witness the Apollo missions, but you were born just at the right time to see what comes next. Artemis 3 is next, launching in 2027. It will test the docking of Orion with commercial lunar landers from SpaceX and Blue Origin in Earth orbit, proving out the systems needed to actually land on the moon. And then Artemis 4, targeted for 2028, will attempt the first crewed lunar landing since 1972, the first time human boots will touch the surface of the moon in over half a century. And when that crew looks up from the lunar ground, they'll see Earth the same way the Artemis 2 crew saw it from their windows. Small, fragile, and worth everything it took to get there. Clearly.