NASA just released 12,000 photos from Artemis 2. Here are our top picks

You can now browse through more than 12,000 photos taken by the Artemis 2 astronauts during their mission around the moon.

The images range from stunning views of Earth to shots of the astronauts inside their Orion capsule to breathtaking images of the moon and the crew’s unique perspective from beyond its far side. They’re the first pictures taken by astronauts traveling beyond low Earth orbit in more than 50 years, and they show our home planet and its celestial neighbor in brand new, incredible ways.

The 10-day Artemis 2 mission launched on April 1, flying NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, as well as Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen, on a journey around the moon aboard the Orion space capsule “Integrity”. The crew managed to transmit a few photos during their mission, but due to data limits, NASA was forced to wait for the physical SD cards to return to Earth before recovering the bulk of the data. Since their successful splashdown in the Pacific Ocean on April 10, NASA has been poring through all the photos they took — and now you can, too.

Many photos were released in the weeks following the mission’s end, but now NASA has released a whopping 12,217. You can scroll through them yourself on the agency’s public archive of astronaut photographs. Here are some of our top picks.

The two images above show Earth mostly in the dark. They were shot on April 3, as Orion was on its way to lunar space.

This is a six-second exposure of the stars seen outside Intregrity’s window. To get a photo like this on Earth, you need several minutes of exposures for the star trails to start becoming clear. Orion, however, spent its journey to the moon rotating to distribute the heat buildup from the sun, a spin captured by the above photograph.

This picture shows the moon with a brown, almost rust-colored region on its face. During their trip around the moon, the Artemis 2 astronauts described seeing browns, greens and other subtle colors on the lunar surface.

This image of the moon’s surface features two small craters named by the Artemis 2 crew. One they named “Integrity,” after the spacecraft that kept them safe throughout their mission. The other they named “Carroll,” after Wiseman’s late wife, who died of cancer in 2020.

From the far side of the moon, the astronauts snapped this photo through one of Orion’s windows. It shows a quarter moon in the foreground, with a bright but tiny Earth behind.

During their lunar flyby on April 6, the Artemis 2 crew witnessed a solar eclipse from beyond the far side, when the sun dipped behind the planetary body’s disk. For the astronauts, the sun’s corona, or outer atmosphere, shone brightly, providing a rare perspective of the moon.

Finally, a tiny Earth peeks out from behind the moon in this image shot shortly after the end of the crew’s closest lunar approach. During their mission, the Artemis 2 astronauts flew farther from Earth than any crewed mission in history, reaching a maximum distance of approximately 252,760 miles (406,773 km).