Reid Wiseman Films Earth Setting Behind the Moon With His iPhone 17 Pro Max

As our view of Earth began to fade, NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman went for his phone as if it were second nature. Just hours previously, the Artemis II crew had taken four of them on a daring ride around the moon in the dependable Orion spacecraft. The commander, Wiseman, found a chance to film the entire scene through a narrow glass in the docking hatch. He took out his beloved iPhone 17 Pro Max, pressed the record button, and let it roll for a while.

The end result is around 50 seconds of raw, unedited footage from the time he started recording. At first glance, Earth appears as a bright sliver against the blackness of space, with the moon’s cratered surface visible in the right-hand corner. Then, as Orion moved, the Earth began to slide down the frame and was engulfed by the moon’s edge. Wiseman captured every second of it just as it happened, with no clipping or editing, just what his own two eyes witnessed through the glass.

The real icing on the cake is the background noise, which comes from a nearby Nikon camera as Christina Koch fiddles with the 400mm lens and clicks away with a three-shot bracket to get those challenging lighting conditions just so for a still photograph. Victor Glover and Jeremy Hansen are getting a similar show from a larger window a few feet away, but Wiseman has the shot, and the phone’s small size is ideal for this tight squeeze; larger gear would have been hard to fit.

Artemis II was the first crewed mission to leave low Earth orbit since Apollo 17, a ten-day journey that took the astronauts within a few hundred miles of the lunar surface before returning. It wasn’t until just a few weeks before liftoff that the engineers gave the go-ahead for personal phones to be used on the mission, weighing all the risks, radiation, temperature swings, space vacuum, and so on, but, hey, the iPhone 17 Pro Max handled it all with ease, as it stayed focused on the far-off Earth, even though window reflections and a few stray dust particles were interfering with the early photos.