When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission.The Milky Way shines in a new image captured by the Artemis 2 crew. | Credit: NASAThe Artemis 2 crew captured this majestic photo of the Milky Way through the window of their Orion spacecraft “Integrity” on April 7, less than a day after completing a historic lunar flyby that saw them temporarily lose communications with Earth as they looped around the far side of the moon.What is it?A river of shining stars and dusty filaments marks the galactic plane of the Milky Way — the colossal galaxy that we call home. This particular view of our host galaxy doesn’t look directly towards the core, but rather into one of its spiral arms, where countless deep-space objects areshining against the blackness of space.Why is it amazing?The pink cloud at the center of the shot is the Homunculus Nebula, a vast glowing structure of interstellar dust and gas 7,500 light-years from Earth, according to NASA, created in the wake of a cataclysmic eruption of the double star system Eta Carinae.AdvertisementAdvertisementStar clusters and dimmer nebulas are visible threaded through the galactic plane, while the Large Magellanic Cloud — a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way — appears as a hazy patch of light to the bottom right of the shot.From space, the crewmember who captured the image was blissfully free of the atmospheric interference that usually comes hand in hand with capturing the glowing band of the Milky Way. However, a slight blurring of stars at the edge of the frame seems to betray the subtle motion of the spacecraft — or camera — over the course of the 10-second exposure.When was it taken?The image was captured less than a day after NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, and the Canadian Space Agency’s Jeremy Hansen executed a historic flyby of the lunar …
