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.
There's a collection of lights off-center up & to the right. Is that a reflection?
Just ran across this in my photos from a recent #StarTrek conversation. In the original cut of "Miri," which featured a rare exact Earth duplicate, a simple globe without annotations was used to convey the point. This was before the 1st Moon landing. I would guess the audience at the time was unused to seeing the Earth from space. Later remasters added clouds. Remarkable how banal the view has become.
Mark McCaughrean
Darth Hideout 🏳️🌈