“Like watching sunset at the beach from the most foreign seat in the cosmos.”
By Shannon Connellan on April 20, 2026
Earthset, captured Apr. 6, 2026, by Christina Koch. Credit: NASA
The staggering visuals from the Artemis II mission just keep coming. On Sunday, Commander Reid Wiseman shared an extraordinary video he shot on an iPhone 17 Pro Max from inside NASA’s Orion spacecraft, and it’s a stunner.
“Like watching sunset at the beach from the most foreign seat in the cosmos, I couldn’t resist a cell phone video of Earthset,” Wiseman wrote in an X post. The moment when Earth appears to sink below the moon’s horizon, Earthset was captured by the Artemis II crew from Orion on April 6, 2026, during the historic lunar flyby.
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“I could barely see the Moon through the docking hatch window but the iPhone was the perfect size to catch the view,” Wiseman added.
For this “uncropped, uncut” video, the commander used an iPhone 17 Pro Max, which has a 48 megapixel triple rear camera array with 8x optical-quality zoom (which Apple claims is “the longest iPhone Telephoto ever”). When Mashable’s Stan Schroeder reviewed the iPhone 17 Pro Max, he praised the zoom as “not just a parlor trick” and recommended “you should use the zoom feature on this phone, and use it often.” Turns out shooting Earthset from space was an optimal opportunity to put said zoom to the test, one few of us will ever get.
SEE ALSO: This historic photo tells the Artemis II story in a single shot
Latest model iPhones aren’t the only gadgets the Artemis II team had onboard. The shutter sound you can hear in the video, Wiseman noted, is mission specialist Christina Koch snapping away with her Nikon D5 (7731.T) camera, a digital single-lens reflex (DSLR) model with a 400-millimeter lens, using three-shot bracketing (triggering rapid automatic shots to capture the same image multiple times). Two Nikon cameras (the D5 and a Z9), alongside four modified GoPros (reportedly Hero 11s), allowed the astronauts to document the visual delights of their mission.
Koch’s resulting Earthset images, just like Wiseman’s video, are nothing short of marvellous — as NASA writes, “is reminiscent of the iconic Earthrise image taken by astronaut Bill Anders 58 years earlier as the Apollo 8 crew flew around the Moon.”
Earthset, captured Apr. 6, 2026, by Christina Koch. Credit: NASA
Where were the other two Artemis II astronauts during this glorious Earthset? Reid said pilot Victor Glover “was in window 3 watching,” with Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen “next to him.” As Mashable space reporter Elisha Sauers explains, “They spent about seven hours rotating through observation shifts on the sixth day of the mission, swapping lenses, calling out features, and firing off photos as the spacecraft arced around the far side of the moon.”
The historic Artemis II mission has seen the internet fiercely glued to their social media feeds, with the crew beaming home content during the 10-day flight around the moon. Just because they’re back on Earth doesn’t mean the content stops.
NASA’s Artemis II mission concludes with a perfect splashdown in the Pacific
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