Over the weekend, the astronauts on NASA’s Artemis 2 mission snapped some of the most evocative images of Earth from space. And they were shot on an iPhone 17 Pro Max, though not with the lens you’re probably expecting.
What is left for the “shot on iPhone” advertising to showcase, if not the vast, infinite darkness of space, or at least the pale blue dot we terrestrial beings call home? The photos themselves are stunning due to the soft lighting of mission specialist Christina Koch’s and Commander Reid Wiseman’s faces compared to the magnificence of the planet from outside Earth’s orbit.
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And what’s more, these are selfies. Wiseman and Koch took their photos of the Orion spacecraft’s main cabin window with the iPhone 17 Pro Max’s 18-megapixel front camera. Apple upgraded last year’s iPhone 17 lineup with the ability to shoot horizontal selfies while holding the phone vertically. While the average viewer may assume these photos were from the phone’s main 48-megapixel “fusion” camera, it’s clear the good front sensor does a solid job.
It appears that the space-based photographers didn’t need to do much to take the shot. Examining the EXIF data for each image provided on NASA’s website, we can see the camera settings were kept at their default focal length and exposure. These pictures were edited in Adobe Lightroom Classic, though it doesn’t appear there was much editing needed to make each picture more epic.
NASA is using an ancient GoPro on Artemis 2
These photos are remarkable not just for their moody lighting but because they’re some of the few taken with the four iPhone 17 Pro Max phones stowed on board. Other photos, such as the team’s shot of the approaching Moon on April 4, were shot with a Nikon DSLR camera. So far, NASA has not released any photos taken with the iPhone 17’s rear camera array.
Other shots of Earth’s nearest neighbor and “selfies” of the Orion spacecraft were taken with an ancient GoPro Hero 4 Black. The action camera is mounted on the exterior of the module, and it seems NASA can control where the lens is pointing. That GoPro first debuted in 2014, sporting the ability to shoot in 4K at a whopping 30 fps. That action camera was novel for the time, but you would have thought the rocket scientists at the U.S. space agency would have provided their astronauts with an updated model. Hell, send them up with a 360 camera to help them take some planetoid images from outside the Orion spacecraft.
The Artemis 2 crew is using a mix of cameras to record their mission. We’ll see if they learn how to flip around their iPhones Monday as they get close enough to photograph the lunar surface and 600-mile-wide Orientale basin.
