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Earthrise

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Earthrise

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Earthrise, William Anders, NASA, 1968

It’s never easy to identify the moment a hinge turns in history. 

When it comes to humanity’s first true grasp of the beauty, fragility and loneliness of our world, however, we know the precise instant. It was on December 24, 1968, exactly 75 hours, 48 minutes and 41 seconds after the Apollo 8 spacecraft lifted off from Cape Canaveral en route to becoming the first manned mission to orbit the moon. 

Astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders entered lunar orbit on Christmas Eve of what had been a bloody, war-torn year for America. 

At the beginning of the fourth of 10 orbits, their spacecraft was emerging from the far side of the moon when a view of the blue-white planet filled one of the hatch windows. 

“Oh, my God! Look at that picture over there! Here’s the Earth coming up. Wow, is that pretty!” Anders exclaimed. 

He snapped a picture—in black and white. Lovell scrambled to find a colour canister. “Well, I think we missed it,” Anders said. 

Lovell looked through windows three and four. “Hey, I got it right here!” he exclaimed. A weightless Anders shot to where Lovell was floating and fired his Hasselblad. 

“You got it?” Lovell asked. “Yep,” Anders answered. 

The image—our first full-color view of our planet from off of it—helped to launch the environmental movement. And, just as important, it helped human beings recognize that in a cold and punishing cosmos, we’ve got it pretty good.

These days, we have a lot of images of Earth from space. Which is awesome. But before we went to space, we had some ideas about what Earth might look like, too.

In 1893, the book Astronomy for Beginners featured this image of Earth from an unnamed viewpoint in their chapter on “Visitors.”

The images in this book are mostly photographs of plaster models based on observations of amateur astronomer James Nasmyth. Most of the images in this book are modelled on their direct observations, but this one represents the view of the Earth from the moon. 

Part of considering the moon as a world, a place like Earth, required this kind of shift in perspective. Seeing the Earth eclipse the sun from the Moon makes it feel much more like a real world.

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In 1898, the book The Story of the Sun, Moon, and Stars included this image of the Earth seen from the moon

Text Appearing Before Image:

The moon is very much smaller than the earth. Her diameter is about two-sevenths of the earth’s diameter; her entire surface is about two twenty-sevenths of the earth’s surface; her size is about two ninety-ninths of the earths size; and her whole weight is about one-eightieth of the earths weight. Attraction or gravitation on the surface of the moon is very different from what it is on the earth. 

Her much smaller bulk greatly lessens her power of attraction. While a man from earth would, on the surface of the sun—supposing he could exist there at all—lie helpless, motionless, and crushed by his own weight, he would on the moon find himself astonishingly light and active. A leap over a tall house would be nothing to him. The moon, unlike the sun, has no light or heat other own to give out. Rays of sunlight falling upon her, rebound thence, and find their way earthward.

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