A few weeks ago, I wrote about the rise of AI-generated slop videos showing impossibly crisp footage of meteorites hitting the Moon that, we are being asked to believe, was impossibly shot on a modern smartphone while standing on the Earth’s solid ground. Then along comes Reid Wiseman, commander of Artemis II, casually filming something real and far more impressive: Earth, on which all of us are at the time of recording, slowly disappearing behind the Moon… and all captured on an actual iPhone.
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
The video, captured during the crew’s journey around the Moon, shows what astronauts call “Earthset,” the opposite of the sunset we see here every evening here on our home planet, and the inverse of the iconic Earthrise image taken by Apollo 8 astronauts.
As Wiseman described it, it’s like watching a sunset “from the most foreign seat in the cosmos.” The footage was shot through the Orion spacecraft’s window and is unedited and zoomed to roughly match what the human eye sees. It didn’t require any equipment more complex than the phone you can buy at your local Verizon or AT&T outlet.
Artemis II Astronaut Captures Rare ‘Earthset’ From Behind The Moon
The whole crew was documenting the journey with a variety of instruments, including commercially available smart phones included. During their time up there, they recorded meteorite impacts, signified by flashes of light that quickly blanketed the lunar surface, which could one day help them assess risks for future missions. They walked away with a treasure trove of instantly iconic images that millions of Americans, myself included, set as our PC desktop backgrounds to stare at in slack-jawed awe whenever we fire up our laptops.
But it’s the Earthset video captured on a common smartphone that seems the most likely to echo through the halls of history. And not because it’s flashy, but because it isn’t. In an era where AI can fabricate spectacle in an instant, a handful of people in a spaceship snuck behind the moon to capture images on actual smartphones that are infinitely better than anything AI could have dreamed up. That’s the stuff of legends.
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