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It’s a view that only a handful of humans have ever witnessed: a distant Earth disappearing behind a huge moon.
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NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman, who commanded the Artemis II mission around the moon, posted a spectacular video on X of Earthset from the lunar far side, showing our home planet fading out of view.
“Like watching sunset at the beach from the most foreign seat in the cosmos,” Wiseman wrote about the video, which he filmed out the window of the Orion spacecraft. He described the experience as “only one chance in this lifetime.”
Wiseman and his crewmates, NASA astronauts Christina Koch and Victor Glover and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen, launched toward the moon on April 1. They spent 10 days circling Earth and the moon then returned home on April 10, splashing down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego.
During the mission, the Artemis II astronauts became the first people to see much of the lunar far side — the side of the moon that permanently faces away from Earth — with their own eyes.
Wiseman said he “couldn’t resist a cell phone video of Earthset” while traveling around the moon on April 6. The video shows close-up details of the moon’s crater-filled surface.
“I could barely see the Moon through the docking hatch window,” Wiseman wrote, “but the iPhone was the perfect size to catch the view…this is uncropped, uncut with 8x zoom which is quite comparable to the view of the human eye.”
As Wiseman was capturing cellphone footage of Earthset, his fellow crew members were also busy snapping photos and recording observations about the moon’s impact craters and rugged topography.
“You can hear the shutter on the Nikon as @Astro_Christina is hammering away on 3-shot brackets and capturing those exceptional Earthset photos through the 400mm lens,” Wiseman wrote on X, referring to Koch.
The astronauts spent about seven hours taking photos and gathering observations during the lunar flyby. The photos from the mission released thus far have included stunning views of the moon’s terrain, with Earth in the distance. Many more images are expected to be publicly released in the coming weeks and months.
Wiseman’s Earthset video is a nod to the iconic Earthrise photo taken during the Apollo 8 mission in 1968. The Apollo 8 photo, however, showed Earth re-emerging into view, rather than disappearing, as astronauts Bill Anders, Frank Borman and Jim Lovell circled the moon.
Artemis II was NASA’s first mission to the moon in more than 50 years. Wiseman, Koch, Glover and Hansen were the first people to launch aboard the agency’s Space Launch System rocket and Orion capsule.
The agency is focused next on the Artemis III mission, which is expected to launch in mid-2027. The plan calls for the crew — which has not yet been announced — to stay in low-Earth orbit to conduct technology demonstrations with commercially built moon landers from SpaceX or Blue Origin, ahead of a planned moon landing during the Artemis IV mission in 2028. NASA intends for one of those landers to dock with the Orion capsule in lunar orbit, then carry astronauts to the lunar surface.
