Never let it be said that the Artemis II crew didn’t understand the assignment.
When the four-person astronaut team lifted off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida for their historic 10-day jaunt around the moon last month, one of their main tasks – other than testing out the Orion over the course of its first crewed flight — was to behave like proper tourists and document everything they saw.
The crew, comprised of NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Kock alongside Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen, didn’t disappoint, shooting with both Nikon cameras and their own iPhones for the entire record-breaking 694,481-mile journey aboard their Orion spacecraft along with photos recorded by automated systems on the spacecraft. The resulting photo dump includes breathtaking images of star trails, the Milky Way, the sun’s corona peeking out from the moon during the solar eclipse, alongside snapshots of the crew members themselves smiling and posing over the course of the mission.
Now NASA has released more than 12,000 photos the team snapped, a collection that includes both previously released images and brand-new-to-us photos from the literal dark side of the moon, our first trip near the lunar surface in more than half a century. You can scroll through the images at your leisure on NASA’s clunky-but-workable Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth.
In the meantime, here are some of our favorites:
