‘Only one chance in this lifetime’: Artemis II astronaut shares rare ‘Earthset’ footage from space — watch

Artemis II commander Reid Wiseman captured a rare “Earthset” during the mission’s lunar flyby, showing our planet disappearing behind the Moon. The footage, taken from deep space, highlights the Moon’s surface as Earth shrinks to a crescent and vanishes. This once-in-a-lifetime view, last seen during the Apollo missions, occurred as the crew passed over the Moon’s far side.

Nasa astronaut and Artemis II commander Reid Wiseman has shared striking footage of a rare “Earthset” captured during the spacecraft’s lunar flyby on April 6, showing Earth slowly disappearing behind the Moon as seen from deep space.The visuals highlight the Moon’s rugged, cratered surface in the foreground, while Earth appears as a luminous blue-and-white sphere along the lunar edge. In subsequent frames, the planet narrows into a thin crescent of light before vanishing completely behind the Moon’s limb — the boundary where the lunar surface blocks the view of space beyond.The phenomenon occurred as the Artemis II crew passed over the far side of the Moon, a region where Earth is temporarily hidden from view. From this vantage point, the planet appears distant and delicate, briefly disappearing behind the lunar horizon before reappearing later in orbit.Describing the moment, Wiseman called it a once-in-a-lifetime experience, writing: “Only one chance in this lifetime… Like watching sunset at the beach from the most foreign seat in the cosmos, I couldn’t resist a cell phone video of Earthset.”He further likened it to “watching a sunset at the beach, but from the most unfamiliar seat in the universe,” adding that the crew had reached their farthest point from Earth — about 252,756 miles away — setting a new distance record for human spaceflight.Inside the Orion capsule, astronaut Christina Koch captured high-resolution images using a 400mm lens with 3-shot bracketing, while Victor Glover and Jeremy Hansen observed the scene through nearby windows. Wiseman recorded the moment on an iPhone with 8x zoom, noting it closely matched human perception in space.“I could barely see the Moon through the docking hatch window, but the iPhone was the perfect size to catch the view… this is uncropped, uncut with 8x zoom which is quite comparable to the view of the human eye,” he said.Such “Earthset” views are rare, last seen during the Apollo missions more than five decades ago. The Artemis II crew also witnessed a reverse “Earthrise” as Earth re-emerged from behind the Moon, along with a solar eclipse viewed from space.