First photos of solar eclipse from Artemis II crew look almost too good to be real

The Artemis II astronauts have already captured some incredible sights of the Earth and Moon during their journey. Now we can add a new visual to that list: a total solar eclipse as seen from deep space. It looks almost too perfect; the Moon has crisp, but uneven edges, while bright stars dot the area around it.

Another photo shared by NASA shows the Earth, a portion of it cloaked in shadows, setting beyond the Moon. It’s meant to resemble the “earthrise” image captured by the astronauts on the Apollo 8 mission nearly six decades ago.

The four-member crew witnessed the eclipse while beyond the Moon, creating a vastly different visual experience from what we would typically see on Earth, as noted by CNN and Scientific American. In addition to experiencing a longer total eclipse totality from space — lasting nearly one hour instead of just a few minutes here on Earth — the Artemis II crew got a glimpse at the Sun’s corona wispily peeking out from behind the Moon without interference from the Earth’s atmosphere.

”It’s just indescribable. No matter how long we look at this, our brains are not processing this image in front of us,” Commander Reid Wiseman told NASA mission control during the eclipse on Monday. “It is absolutely spectacular, surreal... there’s no adjectives, I’m going to need to invent some new ones, there’s absolutely no words to describe what we are looking at out this window.”

In case you’re curious, here are the details about the solar eclipse image embedded at the top of this article:

And here are the details for Artemis II’s take on Apollo 8’s earthrise:

Update, April 7th: Added metadata for two of NASA’s photos.