Sharing a new study inspired by the iconic “Earthset From the Lunar Far Side” image recently captured during the Artemis II mission and published by NASA. The work was created to celebrate the success of the mission, as well as the International Day of Human Space Flight!
This project is a 3D recreation of that Earthset view, focused on staying as faithful as possible to the original photograph. Since one of my previous artworks already explored a similar Earth and Moon composition and I already had the assets prepared, I wanted to approach this by closely matching the reference.
A significant part of the process was dedicated to matching the reference as closely as possible. I started by using the Ohm crater, which NASA noted as being visible in the image, as a landmark to locate it within the texture and properly orient the Moon. I also spent time experimentally determining the approximate focal length used in the original photograph. In the end, I feel the effort was well worth it!
While a perfect match between the render and the reference would have been possible, I felt it would not bring much new value to the discussion, which is why I allowed myself some artistic freedom. I slightly adjusted the Moon’s color and added stars in the background, reflecting how space is often imagined rather than how it is typically captured.
Hahaha, I appreciate that! Yeah, I wanted to push it a bit further and make it more visually appealing. The low-contrast “brown” Moon and lack of stars felt a bit underwhelming (and honestly a bit eerie). I didn’t want to stop at just recreating the photo since that wouldn’t really add any new value or perspective.
Haha yes, it felt like a scary black void without them, too empty. With stars it feels more exciting and closer to what you’d expect to see, so I couldn’t resist adding them
Your image is so good that someone’s gonna see it and say: “I told ya so! We didn’t go to the moon this time around either. It’s all just done in Blender, just like it was back in 1969.”
Thank you for the support! Honestly, a similar thought crossed my mind too, one of my friends even joked that flat-earthers could end up using the render for their “evidence”
Had to double take, you really nailed the reference! It was fun matching the spots you pointed out in the breakdown with the final render, it all checks out
