NASA shared the first high-resolution images of Earth made by the Artemis II crew as their Orion spacecraft passed roughly halfway between Earth and the Moon. Mission commander Reid Wiseman took the photographs after a trans-lunar injection burn placed Orion on course for its lunar flyby.
At about 07:00 BST, NASA’s online mission dashboard put the capsule 142,000 miles (228,500 kilometres) from Earth and 132,000 miles from the Moon. Astronaut Christina Koch said the crew greeted the halfway milestone with a shared sense of joy. It arrived about two days, five hours and 24 minutes after launch.
The first released photograph, titled *Hello, World*, presents the Atlantic Ocean beneath a thin atmospheric glow. Earth blocks the Sun in the frame, green auroras can be seen near both poles, and NASA identified a bright object at the lower right as Venus. The planet’s orientation puts the western Sahara and Iberian Peninsula on the left, with eastern South America on the right.
Wiseman also captured the boundary separating Earth’s illuminated and dark hemispheres, known as the terminator. A later NASA release showed the planet almost entirely at night, with artificial lights visible on its surface. The agency paired a 2026 view with an image from Apollo 17 in 1972, the last mission on which humans walked on the Moon.
The four-person mission left Kennedy Space Center in Florida before carrying out the engine burn that sent it beyond Earth orbit. Its free-return-style loop is intended to take Orion around the Moon’s far side and then back to Earth. The crew was expected to pass behind the Moon on 6 April and splash down in the Pacific Ocean on 10 April. Artemis II marks the first human journey outside Earth orbit since 1972.
The view became a focus for the astronauts soon after the burn. Mission specialist Jeremy Hansen told controllers in Houston that the crew had crowded around Orion’s windows and could see the unlit side of Earth illuminated by moonlight. Their enthusiasm left marks on the glass, prompting Wiseman to ask mission control for advice on cleaning it.
Photographing Earth from that distance also posed a technical challenge. Wiseman told controllers that finding the right exposure was comparable to trying to photograph the Moon from a backyard. The resulting images nevertheless supplied the mission’s first detailed human-made portraits of Earth from deep space, while documenting Orion’s progress toward its closest approach to the Moon.
