Artemis II crew captures rare double auroras on the dark side of Earth as they zoom toward the moon — Space photo of the week

When NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman pointed his camera back at Earth — just as the Artemis II crew’s Orion spacecraft departed for the moon on April 2 — he captured what looks, to the untrained eye, like a regular “Blue Marble” image. But look closer, and you will see a series of hidden details that make this one of the mission’s most unique and poignant images.

When Wiseman took this photograph (with a Nikon D5 camera), he and his record-breaking crew were on the night side of Earth. Yet it looks very much like daytime, because the globe was lit by bright light from the Pink Moon, which had turned full on April 1 — the day before Artemis II launched from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center.

What Wiseman’s camera captured was sunlight reflected by the moon onto Earth, a subtle light he could only capture by maximizing his camera’s sensitivity. Look at the originals, archived on the Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth, and you can see what this view looked like to the naked eye.

Being illuminated largely by moonlight allowed nighttime features to stand out in unusual detail. Look carefully, and you’ll see city lights. From the astronauts’ position above the mid-Atlantic, urban lights can be seen in parts of Spain, Portugal, northern Africa, sub-Saharan Africa and Brazil.

But it’s not just the cities that are aglow. Because this global image includes both the North and South Poles, Wiseman managed to capture an extremely rare display of simultaneous auroras on opposite sides of the Earth. Look at the top left and bottom right segments of the planet, and you’ll spot rival bands of green — the northern and southern lights, generated as charged particles of solar wind race along magnetic field lines and collide with molecules in Earth’s atmosphere.

You can also see a sliver of sunlight shining through Earth’s atmosphere on the bottom-right limb of our planet; evidence that it’s one day past full moon. In another, otherwise identical image taken with a faster shutter speed, the illuminated atmosphere appears only as a slim blue crescent.

Beyond that crescent is a bright fuzzy patch of zodiacal light, a faint glow caused by sunlight scattering off interplanetary dust. It’s sometimes called “false dawn” and “false dusk” when it’s seen near the horizon in very dark locations on Earth (typically during twilight close to the equinoxes). Beyond that bright patch, in the bottom-right corner, shines the planet Venus.

The image of Earth in the foreground, auroras at the poles, sunlight bending through the atmosphere, glowing cosmic dust and Venus make this shot feel like a family portrait of the inner solar system.

In a single frame, Wiseman turns Earth from a familiar “Blue Marble” into something rarer: a moonlit, solar-charged, living planet seen in its true cosmic setting.