“Copy, Moon Joy.”

This generation’s Moon Moment has been a source of hope and inspiration the likes of which we have not felt in years.

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Artemis II has been the gift that keeps on giving.

For four days straight, I, like hundreds of thousands of people, kept NASA’s 24/7 livestream constantly running on my phone as the Orion spacecraft Integrity whipped around the Earth, then sailed onward to the Moon.

Along the way, we watched Christina, Reid, Victor, and Jeremy share hilarious moments, moments that made us cry, moments that made our chests heave with pride, moments that made us hope again.

Hope.

My entire life, I have seen endless wars, I have seen endless bickering politicians, endless division, endless greed, endless destruction of our environment, and complete apathy toward renewable energy by uncaring politicians who take money from lobbyists and corporate machines.

And as March closed around us, pressured us, needlessly raised the cost of living, many of my generation again felt choked out from the world.

Then Artemis II launched on April 1st–and suddenly we had hope.

Watching the livestream, thousands of us collaborating and sharing and commenting on social media with every new photo drop, quote, laugh and cry, we felt united. The adrenaline. The dopamine. The emotion.

Then came the moment.

On Monday, April 6th, the astronauts reached the Moon. I started watching the livestream at 7am MST, and had it running nonstop until nearly midnight, my phone constantly at my side playing the live footage. As I worked, as I ate lunch, as I hosted sidewalk astronomy that evening–Moon Joy was there.

We didn’t start getting high-quality downlinked photos until Tuesday morning, but on Monday, we witnessed the Moon go from being nearly Full, to Gibbous, to Half, to Crescent, and then, in a spectacular moment, it eclipsed the Sun, and the Sun shone around it, a halo more glorious than any solar eclipse witnessed on Earth.

I’m going to be honest: typing that last sentence made me tear up. Actively crying right now. Phew. Hold on. Let me just–post the picture.

A perilunar eclipse viewed from the Orion spacecraft, 4000 miles above the Moon

I mean. Look at it. Look at that. That black ball of rock just suspended in space. The glow you see on the left side? Not sunlight. Earthshine. Earth’s atmosphere reflecting light up to the Moon and faintly illuminating part of it.

Those dots? See those dots? Those are Saturn, Mars, and Mercury, suspended in space on Earth’s morning side of the Sun (aka if you wake up pre-sunrise for the next several months, you will see them).

Magical. Absolutely magical.

One of my personal favorite moments was watching Earth slide into view, then vanish behind the Moon. Earthset, as opposed to the famous Earthrise photo from Apollo 8.

As Orion drifted behind the Moon, Earth graced the limb, then vanished behind it.

Obviously, this picture is my laptop and phone backgrounds, now.

Another haunting moment: before the Sun returned to view, one of the solar panel array cameras captured this sight:

I mean…COME…ON.

Absolute scene out of a sci-fi movie. Except this? This is real.

Right above the spacecraft, you see that bright white dot? That’s Venus. Saturn and Mars are also visible to the lower right of the Moon from this angle, about an hour after the other picture.

Prior to passing behind the Moon, as the crew approached, they had the chance to name two fresh craters on the Moon. One they called Integrity, after the name of their Orion capsule. Then, in a moment that made tens of thousands of us cry (prolly more, tbh), Jeremy Hansen requested that a second crater be named “Carroll,” after Commander Reid Wiseman’s late wife, a pediatric nurse practitioner who died of cancer in 2020. Her crater sits along the limb of the Moon just facing the Earth, so a few days out of the month, it’s visible near Einstein Crater on the Moon’s northwestern limb.

“It’s a bright spot on the Moon, and we would like to call it Carroll.”

This entire mission has brought so many people in the world together, sharing joy, sharing inspiration, sharing hope, sharing love, sharing wonder, sharing art.

Sharing humanity.

The livestream is still ongoing as the crew returns to Earth, which can be found. They will splashdown in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego at 8:07pm PDT on Friday, April 10th, marking 10 days, 1 hour, 32 minutes of mission elapsed time.

If all goes well, Artemis III will launch in 2027 and practice integration between commercially-designed Human Lander Systems from SpaceX and Blue Origin. Finally, we should have our biggest moment of the generation in 2028 with Artemis IV’s Moon landing–and the foundations of a permanent lunar outpost.

We needed this moment. And if all goes to plan, perhaps we’ll have many more Moon Joy moments.

Find all the official pictures of the Artemis II mission here. Any pictures not on this site are NOT from this mission. I have included some of my favorites not already shown in this post below.