You'll likely catch this image a million times in your various feeds: Earth as seen by Reid Wiseman from Artemis II en-route to the Moon.
My first thought? That's *really* noisy 🧐
But then I realised – it's the *nightside* of Earth, illuminated by the almost full Moon, not the Sun 🌕
The bright limb at lower-right is where the dayside starts, & the fact that you can see aurorae, airglow, & cities in Europe, Africa, & S & N America also gives the game away.
Cool.
Two planets for the price of one 🙂
This screenshot from Celestia is pretty close to the orientation of the #Artemis II picture taken of Earth's nightside.
The stars in the background line up pretty well, & as @Nina_cried suspected, the bright object to the lower-left of Earth is Venus 👍
And as the original shot suggests, the Sun is behind Earth, slightly to the lower-right of centre, hence the bright dayside limb there.
I tried getting Astrometry.net to solve for the starfield first, but it failed (perhaps not surprisingly given the stupid big planet in the way).
So I went into Celestia, set the time to a reasonable guess for when the Artemis picture might've been taken (I ended up at 00:30 UTC last night), played with the orientation, & bingo – everything lines up.
Not completely perfect, but good enough for government work.
Ha – I promise I didn't check before fiddling in Celestia, but I see that the EXIF information in the original Artemis JPG says it was taken at 00:27:39, presumably UTC.
And putting that time into Celestia, I get a sub-latitude of -2.8º, a sub-longitude of -13.9º, and a distance of ~10,000km from the surface of Earth.
Which is niche information unless you're a planetary aurora specialist like Jonathan Nichols, who asked 🙂
@cosmos4u @Nina_cried As I said, mine was good enough for (ex-)government work 🙂
And a damn sight better than NASA's launch livestream – what a shambles, honestly 🙄
Mark McCaughrean
Daniel Fischer