On the way to the moon, NASA's Artemis II crew photographed Earth's night side glowing under the Pink Moon, April's full moon, with two distinct auroral rings visible at once.
The photograph looks, at first, like a mistake. Earth hangs in the black of space, but instead of the blue-and-white disc that decades of "Blue Marble" imagery have made familiar, the planet glows in muted grays and pale greens, with a ribbon of brighter light pooled across the Pacific. The Sun is not the light source. The Moon is.
This image, captured by Artemis II commander Reid Wiseman with a Nikon D5 on April 2, 2026, is the most counter-intuitive entry in NASA's Blue Marble canon. It is also a quiet vindication of the vantage point the Artemis program was built to provide: a crewed spacecraft on a translunar corridor, looking back at the night side of Earth from a much higher and more equatorial angle than the International Space Station can ever reach.
The light on the planet is moonlight, specifically the Pink Moon of April 1, 2026, the traditional folk name for April's full moon rather than a color. The Moon was still nearly full on the night Wiseman pressed the shutter, and its reflected light illuminated the cloud tops and ocean with enough intensity to make the night side of Earth visible at all. The Sun, on the other side of the planet, was lighting nothing in this frame.
What the camera also caught, faintly, is the subject that gave the Live Science explainer its headline: two auroral rings visible at once. The mechanism is straightforward. Auroras form when charged particles from the Sun are funneled down Earth's magnetic field lines into the upper atmosphere, where they excite oxygen and nitrogen to glow green and red. From a vantage point high above the equator on the night side, an astronaut can sometimes see both the northern and southern auroral ovals curving around their respective magnetic poles in the same photograph: two distinct ribbons of light on a single planet, not the single arc a ground-based observer in Norway or Antarctica would ever see.
Artemis II launched on April 1, 2026 from Kennedy Space Center aboard the Space Launch System, with the Orion capsule "Integrity" carrying Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, mission specialist Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen. The crew executed two low-Earth orbits before the trans-lunar injection burn sent them on a free-return trajectory toward the Moon. Per the mission profile, those orbits reached a perigee of roughly 119 miles and an apogee of about 43,604 miles at a 28.5° inclination, giving the crew extended windows over the night side of Earth precisely when auroral photography was possible.
That geometry is what makes the photo more than a pretty mission keepsake. The International Space Station has been photographing Earth for a quarter century, but it orbits at about 250 miles and at a 51.6° inclination, hugging the day-night terminator rather than lingering over the night side. Orion's outbound corridor, by contrast, climbs much higher and passes over the equator, putting the entire night hemisphere of Earth in a single frame at a moment when the Sun is fully below the horizon. The double aurora is a visual consequence of that geometry: from above, both magnetic poles are visible, and so are both ovals.
The framing of the image is also worth pausing on. It is not a sunlit Blue Marble. It is not a composite of day and night sides stitched together. It is not, despite the casual phrase that sometimes attaches to such photos, a view of "the dark side of the Moon." That phrase belongs to the lunar far side, which never faces Earth. It is simply Earth, on the night side, lit by the Moon, with the faintest atmospheric glow on both magnetic poles at once.
Whether the auroras read as auroras to a non-specialist is a fair question. The Live Science feature is careful on this point: the bright ribbon across the Pacific is moonlight on cloud and water, and the auroral component is the softer, structured green that traces the magnetic poles. In the published image, the greenish bands are visible but subtle, and the photo works first as a portrait of a moonlit Earth and second as a record of the simultaneous auroral ovals.
What the picture adds, beyond the mission, is a new entry in the visual canon of Earth-from-space photography. The original Blue Marble, taken by Apollo 17 in 1972, was a sunlit Africa and Antarctica. The DSCOVR satellite's daily EPIC image is a sunlit full disk. The Artemis II photograph is something different: a full disk of Earth with the Sun below the horizon, lit entirely by another world. It is the kind of frame the program was designed to make possible, and it arrived in the mission's first 24 hours, on the way out rather than on the way back.