Successfully flying around the Moon and returning to Earth in a historic 10-day journey? Easy-peasy for NASA’s Artemis 2 astronauts. Now the really hard part that everybody on Earth can relate to begins: sorting out their phone’s camera roll.
Mission specialist Christina Koch and Commander Reid Wiseman had already stunned the public with their epic Earth photos taken from the Orion spacecraft’s main hatch. While they shared a gallery of shots taken with a Nikon DSLR and GoPro action camera, it was their “selfies,” shot with the iPhone 17 Pro Max’s front-facing camera, that captured everyone’s imagination.
How do you top that? On Sunday, Wiseman shared a video of a view that no human has ever shared before. No big deal, it’s just a “cell phone video of Earthset,” showing our humble Blue Planet setting behind the Moon.
See iPhone 17 Pro Max at Apple.com
Only one chance in this lifetime…
Like watching sunset at the beach from the most foreign seat in the cosmos, I couldn’t resist a cell phone video of Earthset. You can hear the shutter on the Nikon as @Astro_Christina is hammering away on 3-shot brackets and capturing those… pic.twitter.com/8aWnaFJ69c
— Reid Wiseman (@astro_reid) April 19, 2026
“I could barely see the Moon through the docking hatch window but the iPhone was the perfect size to catch the view…this is uncropped, uncut with 8x zoom which is quite comparable to the view of the human eye,” Wiseman said in a post on X. “Enjoy.”
The footage immediately started going viral as jaws dropped to the floor, and likes, reposts, and comments poured in from around the world.
The video is breaking the internet for good reason—it’s as authentic as it gets. The footage isn’t edited and there’s no music. There’s zero polish to it. Just an astronaut zooming in on the Moon through Orion’s window, blurry autofocusing and all, as the iPhone 17 Pro Max’s 8x optical-quality telephoto locks onto the celestial bodies.
Wiseman’s honest reaction only added to the moment. “Would you look at that, man? Wowww. Dude… No wayy. Fin,” he said before the view of Earth disappeared behind the lunar surface.
Dude, we would have reacted in the same exact way. Hopefully, there’s more in their iPhone camera roll.
