05/08/2026
By now everyone has seen the beautiful image NASA released of Earth taken by Artemis II astronaut Reid Wiseman. But let’s take a closer look at this now iconic image to understand it a little bit better.
One thing most people have noticed right away is there are stars in the background, which you typically don’t see in a lot of space images, and is also at the core of many conspiracy theorists arguments about images being fake. So why does this image show stars?
The answer is told by looking at the original image by Reid, which is available from NASA (link below). This released image has been adjusted to bring out details. The Artemis astronauts are taking photos with Nikon Z9 mirrorless cameras and Nikon D5 DSLRs. They do have their iPhones with them as well but it’s unlikely this image was taken with a phone.
The reason is two-fold. The resolution of the image is very high, and also because of what they did with it in post processing. This image was likely taken using the RAW setting which is what most pro photographers use rather than JPEG. RAW gives the photographer the ability to do a lot of adjustments in post-processing unavailable when shooting in other formats. One of those adjustments is to push underexposed areas to appear much brighter. This does come at a cost as this usually results in the image being noisy or grainy, which is what we see in this image.
This image is actually of the night time side of Earth (see original in the comments) adjusted to look more like daytime. We can tell because you see the thin sliver of sunlight on the rim of the Earth on the right edge. You can also make out city lights emitted from some of the larger cities on the surface. We’ll add an annotated version below in the comments.
The Earth is “upside down” in this image so to speak, with the Western half of Africa in the lower left quadrant. You can see Spain and the Iberian peninsula to the lower left near the edge, and the Strait of Gibraltar between them. Appearing faintly over to the right, is South America. Unseen in this image is most of Europe, Asia, or North America, because the Earth is a sphere.
You can also see greenish aurora on the South Pole (at the top right) and the North Pole (at the bottom left), and the bright point of light is Venus.
For more photos directly from NASA in all resolutions visit:
https://images.nasa.gov/
Earth image: Reid Wiseman
