Artemis 2 Astronaut Films Moon With His iPhone: the Results Are Stunning
NASAastronaut Reid Wiseman has delighted skywatchers online after posting a short, unvarnished video of the moon-shot, improbably, on an iPhone, while aboard the Artemis 2 spaceflight.
Shared on X under @astro_reid, the clip has been viewed more than 8.1 million times, with viewers lingering on a scene that looks at once crisp and dreamlike: the moon framed in the foreground, Earth slowly setting in the background, in a quiet reminder of how far from home the camera-and the crew-really were.
“Would you look at that, man,” Wiseman said in the video, posted on April 20.
“Wow,” another crew member responded.
“Wow,” Wiseman said, before adding: “Dude, no way.”
In the caption, Wiseman explained why he reached for a phone rather than a professional camera.
“Only one chance in this lifetime…” he wrote, likening the moment to “watching sunset at the beach from the most foreign seat in the cosmos.”
Wiseman said he “couldn't resist a cell phone video of Earthset,” noting that the iPhone clip is “uncropped, uncut with 8x zoom,” and “quite comparable to the view of the human eye. Enjoy.”
Artemis 2 was NASA's first crewed Artemis flight and a crewed lunar flyby mission-an end-to-end test of the agency's deep-space capabilities as it works toward sustained lunar exploration and, ultimately, future missions farther afield. The mission sent four seasoned astronauts-Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen-around the moon and back on NASA's Orion spacecraft.
Wiseman's post also offered a glimpse of how the moment unfolded inside the spacecraft-part-planned documentation, part-spontaneous marvel.
As Wiseman filmed, he said Koch (@Astro_Christina) “is hammering away on 3-shot brackets” on a Nikon, capturing “those exceptional Earthset photos through the 400mm lens.”
He added that Glover (@AstroVicGlover) was in “window 3 watching with Hansen (@Astro_Jeremy) next to him,” a quiet tableau of crewmates gathered at the glass to watch the cosmos slide past.
But Wiseman's own vantage point came with constraints that made the iPhone feel less like a novelty and more like the right tool.
“I could barely see the Moon through the docking hatch window,” he wrote, “but the iPhone was the perfect size to catch the view.”
The Artemis 2 crew returned safely to Earth on April 10, splashing down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego, California, at the end of their nea-10‑day lunar flyby mission. The Orion spacecraft reentered Earth's atmosphere at high speed before deploying its parachutes and landing in the ocean, where U.S. Navy recovery teams retrieved the crew.
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This story was originally published April 20, 2026 at 6:22 AM.