It’s now over 50 years since the human race went to the moon with the first moon landing by Apollo 11 happening on 11 June 2025. And with NASA’songoing plansto land on the moon again by 2025, we thought what better way to celebrate than with a collection of some of the best photos of the moon in all its glory for you to enjoy.
Enjoy the range of inspiring images of our moon in all shapes and sizes:
A waxing gibbous Moon
Captured from the International Space Station in April 2020, this shot shows a gibbous Moon. Not fully lit, but magnificently highlighted in the blackness of space.
Shuttle Discovery with the Moon
In 2009 this awesome photo of a nearly full Moon was snapped as a backdrop to the space shuttle Discovery. A perfect view of space travel at the Kennedy Space Center.
The view from Artemis I
TheArtemis I missionsent the Orion module around the moon and in doing so the craft used its cameras to capture this photo. It also caught several others including shows of thedark side of the moon.
A waning gibbous Moon over the horizon
Another incredible image of the Moon taken from the vantage of the International Space Station shows it poking over our planet’s horizon just above the coast of Angola.
Here it appears tiny and insignificant, just no less fantastic.
Lunar beauty
This is a view of one of the impact craters on the moon captured by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera in 2018.
This crater is too small to see from Earth, but is one of many on the surface of the moon. It’s thought to be quite young in the grand scheme of things too. NASA has dated it at around 100 million years old based on the patterns of ejecta and surrounding rays.
Oddly beautiful considering the explosive damage that must have happened when the impact occurred.
Moon over Los Angeles
Dan Marker-Mooresnapped a series of 11 images in just under 28 minutes that captured the moon rising above the city of Los Angeles, USA. These photos were then combined into thisbrilliant nighttime composite. A fantastic view over the urban landscape.
Mineral moon
This brilliant image by Andrew McCarthy (Cosmic_background) highlights the wonder of the moon and shows all the different asteroid impacts that have occurred on its surface. The spread of colour shows how far the debris is spread with each impact and the resulting painted view of history too.
It might look like some fairly fascinating planet way off in the depths of space, but this is still actually our moon. The image has been processed and had its colours highly enhanced in order to show variations in the lunar regolith - the layers of dust, soil, broken rock and other materials on the surface.
Luminosity comparison
With this image, Andrew McCarthy wanted to demonstrate just how different the moon and our planet are when seen in terms of their luminosity:
“The full moon is depicted as this bright, luminous thing, but it’s actually as dark as asphalt in the sun.”
Our home reflects a lot of the light from the sun thanks to the atmosphere and at night it looks even more magnificent. But there’s still no denying how awesome the moon can be either.
Supermoon over Manhattan
At the start of 2018, we were lucky enough to see the appearance of thesupermoon. A larger-than-normal vision of the full moon comes about due to the close orbit to Earth during certain periods.
A distant view of the moon
This tiny view of the moon, seen on the distant horizon of Earth was taken by astronaut Karen Nyberg. It was taken from the International Space Station in 2013 and shows an unusual view that really demonstrates how far the moon is from Earth and how insignificant we all are in the grand scheme of things.
