NASA Artemis in HDR

The Moon and Earth as seen by the Artemis II crew in HDR

For the first time since Apollo 17 in 1972, humans made the journey to the Moon. The Artemis II crew captured Earth, Moon, and the void between them from a vantage point no human had seen in over fifty years, using high-quality modern digital cameras.

These photographs were taken in standard dynamic range, but the scenes they record are anything but standard. Below, each image has been manually remapped to HDR and embedded using HDRJPG technology, which allows your browser to retain high dynamic range characteristics, mimicking the natural extreme contrasts of deep space scenery: the blinding sunlit craters, the razor-sharp arc of Earth's atmosphere, the absolute black of the void.

Deep space photography presents one of the most extreme dynamic range challenges imaginable. Without atmosphere to scatter sunlight, the lunar surface blazes under direct solar radiation while everything outside the beam drops to absolute black. NASA cameras capture a fraction of this extreme contrast; the rest is lost to sensor limits, compressed into flat shadows and blown-out highlights.

These are the first photographs taken by human hands from lunar distance since Apollo 17 departed the Moon in December 1972. For over fifty years, this vantage point existed only in robotic imagery — never again witnessed through a human viewfinder until the Artemis II crew made the journey in 2025.

Where the Apollo crews shot on Hasselblad film with a handful of frames per roll, the Artemis II crew carried modern digital cameras capable of capturing far greater detail and tonal range. The photographs they brought back are not only some of the rarest in human spaceflight history — they are also the highest fidelity images ever taken of Earth and the Moon from this distance.

HDRJPG would be able to convert from original, high dynamic range RAW photos into images that can be embedded in a website keeping the real HDR effect, but unfortunately the files provided by NASA are regular JPG images downsampled to standard dynamic range.

Because the original HDR data is not available, we manually mapped the original NASA JPGs to HDR and exported them to EXR format. HDRJPG then comes into play, converting the EXR file into a set of formats that can be embedded in your browser preserving the HDR effect.

Finally, HDRJPG's browser embedding solution makes it possible for the resulting HDR images to be displayed in any modern browser. As long as you have an HDR-capable display, you'll see images that display a notably richer contrast, hopefully capturing a bit more of the awe Artemis astronauts got when staring at the Moon and the Earth on their voyage.

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Thanks to NASA and Artemis II crew: Commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, and mission specialists Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen.

All original photographs are courtesy of NASA and are in the public domain.