NASA Didn't Know What They Did

TL;DR

Stacking ~12,000 Artemis moon mission photos reveals a stunning animation showing auroras, lightning, city lights, and visible Starlink satellites swarming Earth.

Key Points

• 1.NASA released ~12,000 Artemis photos via the Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth project. Most are low-quality or poorly exposed, so the creator built a crowd-voting tool to surface the best ones, with the top pick being an eclipse shot not in NASA's initial release.
• 2.The community-voted top image is an eclipse photo showing zodiacal light. It features window glare artifacts and Earth brightness streaks, and because it wasn't in NASA's original release, the creator swapped it into the September slot of a 2027 Artemis calendar.
• 3.A Reddit user (Responsibility2097) stacked the dark-side Earth photos into a time-lapse animation. The creator granted permission to share it, and it revealed effects nobody anticipated when the images were originally captured.
• 4.The stacked animation shows auroras moving at full-Earth scale, lightning flashes from a thunderstorm, and city lights on coastlines simultaneously. These individual phenomena had been seen from the ISS before, but never combined at this scale in a single animated image.
• 5.The most mind-blowing discovery is visible satellite swarms — likely Starlink — orbiting Earth in the animation. They appear because they catch sunlight at the orbital edge even though Artemis itself was in Earth's shadow, making them detectable purely through reflected photons on a high-ISO, long-exposure camera.
• 6.The creator calls this the single best image from Artemis, and says NASA had no idea it was possible. Victor Glover confirmed in a press conference that Reed Wiseman wasn't even sure the eclipse shot would work — capturing satellite glints was entirely accidental.