NASA released 12,217 raw photos from the Artemis II lunar flyby mission on May 3, 2026 — shot on Nikon D5 SLRs, a Nikon Z9 modified as the Handheld Universal Lunar Camera, and iPhone 17. All public-domain under NASA’s standard media-usage terms.
The full archive lives on NASA’s Image Library, but the official site’s interface isn’t built for browsing thousands of photos quickly. So we built a dedicated browser app that pulls the live data and renders it in a fast, scrollable grid with search and full-resolution downloads.
Use it below, full-screen at artemis-photos.photoworkout.com, or embed it on your own site (see the embed section further down).
What’s Inside the Archive
NASA published 12,217 images in total from the 10-day mission. The set covers the full mission timeline — pre-launch, ascent, Earth-orbit insertion, trans-lunar injection, lunar flyby, return, and splashdown — plus crew portraits, mission-control imagery, and gear documentation shots.
Most of the photography came from three cameras: Nikon D5 DSLRs (mostly inside the Orion capsule), a heavily-modified Nikon Z9 called the Handheld Universal Lunar Camera (used for the deep-space shots, including the celebrated Earth-and-Moon-together frames), and iPhone 17 units issued to each crew member for personal documentation. The Z9 came back from cislunar space with no detectable sensor radiation damage — a result that validated the rig for the Artemis III lunar-surface mission. Our full editorial coverage walks through which camera shot what, and what the Z9 result means for NASA’s camera-procurement strategy going forward.
How to Use the Browser
The interface is deliberately minimal. The search box at the top accepts free-text queries — try "Earth," "Moon," "crew," "Orion," or a specific camera name like "Z9." Below the search, results render in a responsive grid. Click any thumbnail to open a lightbox showing the full-resolution image, plus a direct download link.
Pagination is at the bottom — each page returns the next batch from NASA’s API. The URL bar supports two query params: ?q=<your search> and ?p=<page number>, so you can share or bookmark specific search states.
All data comes live from NASA’s official Image Library API at api.nasa.gov. We don’t proxy, mirror, or cache anything server-side — the app is pure HTML/CSS/JS hitting NASA’s CORS-enabled endpoint directly from your browser.
Embed This Tool on Your Site
The Artemis II Photo Archive Browser is embeddable on any site via iframe. Paste this anywhere HTML is allowed:
<iframe
src="https://artemis-photos.photoworkout.com/"
width="100%"
height="900"
style="border: 0; border-radius: 12px;"
loading="lazy"
title="NASA Artemis II Photo Archive"></iframe>The app is free to embed, no attribution required (though it’s appreciated). NASA’s content terms apply to the photos themselves — see NASA’s media usage policy. All photos in the archive are public domain.
Technical Details
Open-source on PhotoWorkout’s GitHub. Pure vanilla JavaScript, no build step, no framework, no dependencies. Deployed on Vercel as static files. The full source is roughly 250 lines of JavaScript plus the HTML scaffold and CSS — small enough to read end-to-end in a coffee break.
If you find a bug, want a feature, or want to fork the code for a different NASA-API-backed archive (Apollo, ISS, Hubble — same API pattern works for all of them), the GitHub issues and pull requests are open.
Related
This is one of several free PhotoWorkout in-browser apps for photographers. The editorial side of the site also covered the Artemis II photo release in depth — see NASA Dropped 12,217 Real Artemis II Photos — Nikon Z9 Aced Its Deep-Space Radiation Test for the news context, mission timeline, and our analysis of what NASA’s camera choices reveal about deep-space photography requirements.
