Nine days after splashdown in the Pacific Ocean, Artemis II commander Reid Wiseman posted a 53-second video on X, shot on an iPhone. It shows Earth slowly disappearing behind the Moon’s cratered horizon—an event known as “Earthset.” The clip, published on Sunday, April 19, quickly spread across social media.

A sunset from the most unusual place in the universe

“It’s like watching a sunset on the beach, but from the most unusual place in the universe—I couldn’t resist capturing an ‘Earthset’ on my phone,” Wiseman wrote in his post. The video was recorded on April 6 during the historic lunar flyby, as the Orion spacecraft—nicknamed Integrity by its crew—passed around the far side of the Moon. Wiseman held his iPhone up to the narrow window of the docking hatch and used 8x digital zoom to recreate a view close to what the naked eye sees, according to NDTV.

The unedited footage shows swirling clouds over Australia and Oceania, before the blue sphere slips behind the lunar horizon, with a crater visible in the foreground. At the same time, astronaut Christina Koch was capturing the same scene using a professional telephoto lens to obtain high-quality images.

A record-breaking mission

The Earthset occurred during one of the most dramatic moments of the mission. On April 6, the crew reached a maximum distance of 406,890 kilometers from Earth, surpassing the Apollo 13 record set in 1970—400,174 kilometers—by more than 6,400 kilometers. At their closest approach to the Moon, the astronauts passed at an altitude of about 6,550 kilometers above its surface.

Although NASA is not a public company, the mission was launched aboard the agency’s Space Launch System rocket from Kennedy Space Center on April 1. The crew—Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, mission specialist Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen—completed a nearly 10-day journey covering 1,117,900 kilometers and splashed down off the coast of San Diego on April 10.

Echoes of Apollo

NASA’s Artemis program account compared the Earthset imagery to the iconic “Earthrise” photograph taken 58 years ago by Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders during the first crewed lunar flyby. More than half a century has passed since any human last witnessed such a view, India Today reported.

At a post-flight press conference on April 16, Wiseman described the mission as “an incredible journey.” He called the Earthset moment something that happens “only once in a lifetime”—a sentiment that, judging by the rapid spread of the video, has resonated far beyond the space community.