On December 24, 1968, William Anders pointed a Hasselblad camera out the window of Apollo 8, saw a blue marble rising over a gray moonscape, and said exactly what you would expect a human to say: "Oh my God, look at that picture over there!" The crew scrambled for a color magazine. Anders shot four frames. The fourth is one of the most reproduced photographs in history.
Artemis II will try to do it on purpose.
The mission, NASA first crewed lunar flight since Apollo 17 in 1972, launches its four astronauts from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on April 1. On April 6, as the Orion spacecraft swings around the far side of the Moon, the crew will attempt to photograph an Earthrise — a shot that NASA, National Geographic, and dozens of other outlets have already called a recreation of Anders iconic image. The flyby begins at 2:45 PM EDT, with closest approach to the lunar surface at 7:02 PM EDT, 4,066 miles above the Moon — roughly 68 times higher than Apollo 8 orbital path.
The crew — commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, mission specialist Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen — will use two handheld Nikon D5 DSLR cameras to capture the image. They trained for months. The shot is choreographed.
Apollo 8 photograph was not choreographed. Anders was pointing the camera at the lunar surface when the Earth popped above the horizon. He shot before anyone had time to think about composition. "I think it was purely accidental," he said in a 2018 interview with NASA history office. "Not planned at all." The crew did not even have the right film loaded at first — they were shooting black-and-white for geology, not color for posterity.
Artemis II has spent considerably more time thinking about this. NASA Orion blog documented months of planning for the image, including simulation sessions where the crew practiced timing and framing. The mission has two Earthrise opportunities, roughly 45 minutes apart, during the far side pass. Only 20 percent of the lunar far side will be illuminated by sunlight during the flyby, according to Nature, which means the Moon will appear as a thin crescent — not the fully lit globe in Anders photograph.
This creates a geometric problem that the planned-versus-spontaneous framing obscures. Apollo 8 flew just 60 miles above the lunar surface. At that altitude, the Earth horizon clears the Moon horizon by roughly 10 degrees — enough for a full Earthrise over a fully lit lunar surface. Artemis II will be 4,066 miles out according to NASA flight planning, or roughly 4,300 miles per National Geographic — roughly 68 to 72 times higher than Apollo 8 path. From that distance, Orion windows will frame the entire Moon disk at once, including the north and south poles. The Earth will appear smaller. The geometry that made Anders photograph possible — low altitude, fast pass, Earth clearing the horizon — does not exist at 4,000 miles.
What Artemis II will get instead is a wider shot: the Moon as a disk, the Earth as a marble, both in frame without the horizon-on-horizon tension that made the original feel like looking out an airplane window. Nature noted that the Orientale Basin, a 930-kilometer-wide multi-ringed impact crater on the lunar far side, will be one of the terrain features in view. That is geologically interesting. It is not the same photograph.
The mission has already demonstrated it can produce striking images from deep space. Last week, Orion transmitted a "Hello World" photograph showing the Atlantic Ocean framed by atmospheric glow, green auroras at both poles, and Venus in the background. At the time of that shot, Orion was 142,000 miles from Earth and 132,000 miles from the Moon. The image worked because the geometry was right and someone had the camera ready. That part, at least, Artemis II has planned for.
The 40-minute communications blackout during the far side pass means the crew will be out of contact with mission control for the entire Earthrise window. No one on the ground will see the shot in real time. According to NASA flight day blog, the blackout begins at approximately 5:47 PM EDT. The astronauts will be alone with two Nikons and months of simulation.
Apollo 13 still holds the distance record for human spaceflight: 248,655 miles from Earth, set in April 1970 after the mission trajectory had to be bent around the Moon to bring the crippled spacecraft home. Artemis II will break that record. At 7:05 PM EDT on April 6, Orion will be 252,757 miles from Earth — 4,102 miles beyond Apollo 13 mark. The spacecraft also surpassed 100 gigabytes of optical communications data downlinked during the flight, using a laser system that Apollo 8 S-band radio could not have imagined.
Whether the photograph works depends on what you want it to be. If the goal is an image that captures the fragility-of-Earth aesthetic that made Anders shot famous, the altitude works against it. If the goal is a wide-field deep-space composition with both bodies visible and the Orientale Basin in frame, the geometry is actually quite good. NASA has been careful not to promise a recreation. The agency calls it an Earth observation opportunity. That is accurate. The Moon, photographed from 4,000 miles, is a different subject than the Moon photographed from 60 miles. Anders got lucky. Artemis II is hoping for something that looks like luck but took two years to plan.