Artemis II Commander's iPhone Video of Earthset Goes Viral

A Cosmic Sunset Captured on a Phone

Nine days after splashing down in the Pacific Ocean, Artemis II Commander Reid Wiseman has shared a 53-second iPhone video on X showing Earth slowly disappearing behind the Moon's cratered horizon, a phenomenon known as an Earthset. The clip, posted on Sunday 19 April, quickly went viral across social media platforms and has reignited public fascination with crewed lunar exploration.

The Most Foreign Seat in the Cosmos

"Like watching sunset at the beach from the most foreign seat in the cosmos, I couldn't resist a cell phone video of Earthset," Wiseman wrote. The footage was captured on 6 April during the mission's historic lunar flyby, as the Orion spacecraft, named Integrity by its crew, swung around the far side of the Moon. Wiseman held his iPhone up to the narrow docking hatch window, using 8x digital zoom to approximate what the human eye would see.

The unedited clip shows swirling clouds over Australia and Oceania before the blue marble vanishes below the lunar limb, with a Moon crater visible in the foreground. Fellow astronaut Christina Koch simultaneously captured the same scene with a professional long-lens camera for high-resolution imagery.

A Record-Breaking Mission

The Earthset occurred near the mission's most dramatic moment. On 6 April, the crew reached a maximum distance of 252,756 miles from Earth, surpassing the Apollo 13 record of 248,655 miles set in 1970 by more than 4,000 miles. At their closest lunar approach, the astronauts passed within roughly 4,070 miles of the Moon's surface.

The mission launched aboard NASA's Space Launch System rocket from Kennedy Space Center on 1 April. The crew, Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, mission specialist Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen, completed a nearly 10-day, 694,481-mile journey before splashing down off the coast of San Diego on 10 April.

Echoes of Apollo

NASA's official Artemis account compared the Earthset imagery to the iconic Earthrise photograph taken by Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders 58 years ago, during the first crewed flight around the Moon. It had been more than half a century since any human had witnessed such a view. At the post-flight press conference on 16 April, Wiseman described the Earthset moment as having "only one chance in this lifetime", a sentiment that, judging by the video's rapid spread, resonated far beyond the space community.