This week the new Lunar mission, Artemis II, brings us yet another historical milestone with its orbit around the Moon, the first in some 50+ years.
This picture was published by Nasa and shows the Earth captured by one of the astronauts on the Artemis mission compared to the one taken by Apollo back in the 70s.
What’s interesting, is that the Apollo 17 photo appears to be more clear and almost unreal, put next to the new one, from 2026, so how can this be?
While cameras have been advancing over time, they are now compact, fast, most of all – digital. They aren’t exactly better, just made differently. Cameras back then weren’t really worse than they are today, (except for the amateur ones). More importantly, on the Apollo missions, they used Hasselblad, which is the best camera still to this day. It was simply analogue film rather than digital.
The latest photo came from a personal camera of one of the astronauts. It was the Nikon Z9 (source) which is a great camera, so why isn’t the image clearer?
The reasons for the quality appearing “better” back then aren’t actually linked to the camera itself, but rather to the conditions at the moment the photo was taken.
In the case of the more recent photo, the sun was behind the Earth, so the night side of the planet was being photographed with less illumination and the camera lens had to compensate for some haze that was coming through the part where the light comes into the lens, thus making the image less crisp. In the Apollo photo, the sun was behind the camera, thus providing the perfect lighting conditions for the photograph. I’m sure there’s been some contrast and brightness corrections done to both images, this is inevitable, but it’s nothing more than what any developer would do to an image in the dark room, even before the digital era.
Oggs' Earth 
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