Yes, the D5s are the 'official' Handheld Universal Lunar Cameras (HULCs), but (a?) Z9 also got on-board at the 'last minute' (which means two years ago):
the morning after the launch i just randomly went onto their livestream and one of the astronauts was asking mission control for help on also using the gopros and iPhone cameras. i guess they have some. and he was struggling at getting a properly exposed photo with those. he said they were coming out super over exposed. but the D5 was working nominally. mission control said they'd get back to them about ideas on adjusting the gopros and iPhones. but it was funny to hear they're trying "new" tech and struggling with it up in space, and that 2005 D5 is still the champ :)
The SLR-like cameras have a bunch of manual modes so you can 'force' them to get something captured, and you can then perhaps 'fix it in post'.
Modern tech allows more people to capture more things more easily, but when the automation fails there aren't really many manual modes to fall back on.
he was struggling at getting a properly exposed photo with those. he said they were coming out super over exposed.
This is exactly what newbies experience when trying to photograph the moon from Earth. It's not intuitively obvious, but the light coming off the moon is essentially full-daylight bright. But the moon is small against a very black background, and depending on how the auto-exposure is operating, this often leads to guessing that the scene as a whole needs a lot more exposure.
I imagine that trying to photograph the Earth when a significant part of what's in view is experiencing daytime, is very much the same thing.
You have to wonder how unserious this can get. Given the unimaginable cost of this mission, they are faffing around as your typical aunt with Windows Home laptops and iPhones? Seriously?
as a Hassie lover it made me a bit sad that they went with a D5 but hey, who cares about the camera, the picture was worth a billion bucks and it delivered.
It's so refreshing to be mesmorised by a picture in the age of shorts and reels.
I'd have probably shot it wide open at f/2.8 rather than cranking the ISO up to 51200. Incredibly impressed at the steady hands for a sharp image at 1/4 s shutter speed though! Maybe they just let the camera float in space with the mirror up, triggering it remotely.
It's fun to think about tile dilation per the exif captured Create Date: "2026:04:03 00:27:39.26". I know it's negligible over the trip, but when they took it, was their time really "2026:04:03 00:27:39.25"?
My only curiosity, and yeah I know orders of significance etc...
Buuuuut I wonder why they didn't consider a Z5[0][1] and the Z mount 14-24, or the Z5 with an adapter for the F mount 14-24....
There's at least a pound of weight savings on the table.
Specifically, I wonder if it's a fun reason? i.e. it would be interesting if there was a technical reason like 'IBIS fails miserbly' or 'increased sensor resolution adds too much noise' (even at that ISO you gave from the EXIF...)
[0] I'm really more of a Sony person but am thus keenly aware about importance of UX feel, so I tried to keep the question apples to apples here.
Edited to add:
[1] Per [0] I may be stupid in thinking the Z5 is a 'at least minimal' substitute so happy to learn something here.
I was confused when I first saw this photo, as I don't think I've ever before seen a nightside, moonlit Earth, exposed so that it looks like the dayside at a first glance. I wonder how many casual viewers actually realize it's the night side. A nice demonstration of how moonlight is pretty much exactly like sunlight, just much much dimmer. In particular it has the same color, even though moonlight is often thought of as bluish and sunlight as yellowish!
There's something a bit weird having these digital photos and crisp digital audio and video of the astronauts, and seeing pictures of mission control with flat screens after having grown up on grainy analogue video, crackly audio with lots of beeps, and mission control being choc full of CRTs being watch by men in short sleeve shirts with black ties and cigarettes.
If you are interested in taking similar images, there are several satellites transmitting ‘full disk’ images like this, instead of a camera you need a dish or yagi a sdr and lna. Example satellites are Himawari 8, GOES 18, Fengyun 2H.
The exif includes time, but not time zone. They are not quite at the moon, and Lunar Time is under active development but not official. Also clocks tick slower under the moon's weaker gravity. (Or is it faster?)
It really is crazy when you think about it, we're capable of taking a picture of the planet we live on from outer space. We take it for granted, that we know what it all looks like. I often find myself wondering how ancient peoples before us would react to something like this
"It is the first time since 1972 that humans have travelled outside of the Earth's orbit." But they're not tho (Earth's gravitational dominance extends 4x the distance to the moon)
I often think about what an amazing time it is to be alive and how amazing all the tech we have at our fingertips is.
But I am also incredibly saddened by the fact that I was probably born just shy of routine space travel.
I can not even imagine how amazing it would be to look down on earth and see it in its entirety. Hopefully my kids or my grandkids will be able to achieve my dream and do exactly that.
This picture wasn't taken from far away, but I thought about that quote from Carl Sagan -
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
The comparison pictures look like there is more dust in the air today. They don't explain this effect, so I assume it is related to time of day the photo was taken, or camera settings, not actual dust accumulation compared to 1972. However, the direct comparison gives the impression they want people to interpret like the air is getting dirtier?
Why didn't NASA or the news agencies rotate the image so North is up? and slightly to the right. That would make Africa instantly recognizable as that's how maps are imprinted in our brains.
There is no "up" in space, so that wouldn't be editing the image I feel. The camera just happened to be oriented "upside down".
That picture of the "dark" Earth is most fascinating because everyone has seen a million images of Earth before, but how many have seen it in this view. The image by itself says a little about the Earths place in the planetary system.
It's kind of wild how every generation gets its own "Blue Marble" moment. Technically we've seen Earth from space a million times by now, but every new human perspective still hits differently
A beautiful reminder of what's possible with photography when you're using more than a comparatively crappy iPhone Pro Max camera. (Oh and taking the shot from Outer Space.)
387 comments
* https://petapixel.com/2026/04/02/a-nikon-z9-made-it-aboard-t...
They have a thermal blanket for exterior work:
* https://petapixel.com/2026/02/24/artemis-ii-astronauts-will-...
* https://petapixel.com/2025/01/10/the-custom-nikon-z9-and-the...
* Various stories with the "Artemis" tag: https://petapixel.com/tag/artemis/
The D5 has been used on the ISS, including EVAs, since 2017, so they're a known quantity:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cameras_on_the_Interna...
The Mercury and Apollo missions used Hasselblad 500-series-based cameras (modified):
* https://www.hasselblad.com/about/history/hasselblad-in-space...
Modern tech allows more people to capture more things more easily, but when the automation fails there aren't really many manual modes to fall back on.
This is exactly what newbies experience when trying to photograph the moon from Earth. It's not intuitively obvious, but the light coming off the moon is essentially full-daylight bright. But the moon is small against a very black background, and depending on how the auto-exposure is operating, this often leads to guessing that the scene as a whole needs a lot more exposure.
I imagine that trying to photograph the Earth when a significant part of what's in view is experiencing daytime, is very much the same thing.
> ... 2005 D5...
About 11 years too far back:
> The Nikon D5 is a full frame professional DSLR camera announced by Nikon Corporation on 6 January 2016 to succeed the D4S as its flagship DSLR.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikon_D5
It's so refreshing to be mesmorised by a picture in the age of shorts and reels.
How did they get the Earth to light up when it is obviously dark outside? Is this fake?
My only curiosity, and yeah I know orders of significance etc...
Buuuuut I wonder why they didn't consider a Z5[0][1] and the Z mount 14-24, or the Z5 with an adapter for the F mount 14-24....
There's at least a pound of weight savings on the table.
Specifically, I wonder if it's a fun reason? i.e. it would be interesting if there was a technical reason like 'IBIS fails miserbly' or 'increased sensor resolution adds too much noise' (even at that ISO you gave from the EXIF...)
[0] I'm really more of a Sony person but am thus keenly aware about importance of UX feel, so I tried to keep the question apples to apples here.
Edited to add:
[1] Per [0] I may be stupid in thinking the Z5 is a 'at least minimal' substitute so happy to learn something here.
This is consistent with good photographic technique that prioritizes "getting it right in the camera."
Dark Side of the Earth: https://www.nasa.gov/image-detail/amf-art002e000193/
Hello World: https://www.nasa.gov/image-detail/fd02_for-pao/
On images-assets.nasa.gov, we can find the 5567x3712 resolution versions of these pictures:
Dark Side of the Earth: https://images-assets.nasa.gov/image/art002e000193/art002e00...
Hello World: https://images-assets.nasa.gov/image/art002e000192/art002e00...
Do you understand ISO?
It took me 21 years...
https://youtu.be/ZWSvHBG7X0w
This video explains how ISO is very different to what most people imagine, and how you can use this knowledge to take less noisy photos.
The launch, shot on a Nintendo 3DS.
For those with a gen z-like retro tech streak.
I'm sad not alive at a time like Cowboy Bebop oh well, this is a great pic, overview effect
just the lowest hanging fruit that had been a second class citizen to the marvel of having an extraterrestrial angle to begin with
We are not standing on earth looking up at the stars.
We are being held by earth as we look down into an infinite abyss of death.
Everything we are depends on that fragile bubble holding us.
The exif includes time, but not time zone. They are not quite at the moon, and Lunar Time is under active development but not official. Also clocks tick slower under the moon's weaker gravity. (Or is it faster?)
Anyway, what time was this taken?
> The image, titled Hello, World
A new hello.jpg?
Surely our camera gear is exponentially better now? Is the reason for the new image being ‘murkier’ due to light, pollution or something else?
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap260404.html
Because fundamentally it is a large object illuminated by sunlight.
He is "our people," as far as hacking astrophotography from space. [1]
[0] https://old.reddit.com/user/astro_pettit
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42701645
> hey, i'm in a picture with all my friends!
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
https://www.rxjourney.net/30-things-i-know
There is no "up" in space, so that wouldn't be editing the image I feel. The camera just happened to be oriented "upside down".
https://www.nasa.gov/gallery/journey-to-the-moon/
https://epic.gsfc.nasa.gov/
if anything in life gives me pleasure is I have experienced life, with its highs and downs on this little speck.