I downloaded the high-res version of this amazing picture from the Artemis crew and edited it to make it look more like what the astronauts might actually see.
This is a picture from the window of the Artemis capsule (you can see the edge of the window in the bottom left) and, as normally shown online, it’s a bit confusing: it’s actually a picture of the night side of the Earth—illuminated by moonlight appropriately enough!—but it’s been taken with a super-sensitive camera that makes it look like daytime.
The original image, as seen everywhere online, is much brighter than my edited version, and looks like a ‘normal’ daytime picture of our home planet.
So I turned down the brightness on the disk of the Earth a bit, but left the sunlit sliver and surrounding stars bright, because the human eye has a better dynamic range than a digital camera. It also means you can see the city lights in the bottom left of the picture a bit more clearly.
Zoomed-in images of the aurora australis and borealis.
I also took a bit of artistic licence and enhanced the brightness and colours of two of the most spectacular details in this shot—the aurora at the top right and bottom left! The lower ones are particularly amazing: you can see not just the green we typically associate with aurora, but pinks and reds caused by interactions between the solar wind and gases higher in the atmosphere.
On the bottom right, the incredibly bright dot is Venus, and the diffuse mist it’s surrounded by is called the ‘Zodiacal light’, which is sunlight scattered by the thin band of dust that occupies the space between planets in the Solar System. It’s only visible from the darkest places on Earth…
This is an absolutely gorgeous picture. And, to give a sense of scale, it was taken with a lens that’s roughly the same as most smartphones’ main cameras—imagine putting your phone to the plane window to take a picture, but in space.