Earthrise, and every picture of home since

The crew of Apollo 8 were not supposed to be photographing Earth. They were in lunar orbit to scout landing sites, and the flight plan was full of surface targets. On their fourth orbit, the spacecraft rolled and Earth came up over the lunar horizon. The onboard recording catches Bill Anders exclaiming at the sight, then asking urgently for a roll of color film. The picture he took became one of the most reproduced photographs in history.

It is hard now to recover how new that image was, and easy to overstate it. Earth had been photographed from space before. Lunar Orbiter 1 sent back a grainy black-and-white view of Earth above the Moon in August 1966. A weather satellite returned a color image of the full globe in 1967. Stewart Brand had spent 1966 selling buttons asking why we had not yet seen a photograph of the whole Earth, and the first Whole Earth Catalog, published in the autumn of 1968, already had a satellite picture on its cover.

What Anders added was a point of view. Every earlier picture was taken by a machine. Earthrise was framed by a person, from somewhere a person could be: a small colored world hanging over a dead gray foreground.

The picture that was turned upright

Here is something most people who have seen Earthrise do not know. When Anders took it, the lunar horizon ran up the side of the frame. In orbit there is no up. The version on stamps and posters has been rotated so that the Moon lies flat along the bottom like ground and Earth rises over it like a sun, which is what our inner ear insists a horizon should do. A NASA reconstruction of the moment shows how the view actually unfolded from the spacecraft window.

The Blue Marble received a similar correction. The Apollo 17 crew photographed the fully lit disk of Earth on 7 December 1972 with the south polar ice at the top of the frame, and the image was flipped before release so that Africa sat the way it does on a schoolroom globe. There is nothing dishonest in either choice. But it is striking that the two pictures most often said to have freed us from a parochial view of the planet were both first adjusted to match our parochial sense of which way is up.

In orbit there is no up.

The argument of a picture

Earthrise was quickly enlisted into arguments its photographer never made. Within a day of the broadcast from lunar orbit, the poet Archibald MacLeish was writing in The New York Times of “riders on the earth together”. The first Earth Day followed in April 1970. The wilderness photographer Galen Rowell later called it the most influential environmental photograph ever taken.

It is worth being precise about what that influence could have been. The picture contained no new information about the environment. Nobody learned from it that air was polluted or forests were shrinking. What it supplied was a shape for concerns people already had, a single object to attach them to. A photograph cannot make an argument. It can only make an argument feel obvious.

Scale did some of the work. From the Moon, Earth spans about 1.9 degrees of sky, not quite four times the width of the full Moon as we see it. Jim Lovell found he could hide the whole planet behind his thumb. Every person he had ever known, gone behind a thumb: that is an idea no statistic carries as well.

A fraction of a pixel

In 1990 Voyager 1 added a third image to the canon: Earth from six billion kilometers, about 0.12 of a pixel in a frame crossed by scattered sunlight. From there the planet spans less than half an arcsecond. Carl Sagan’s reflection on that picture, that everyone who had ever lived had lived on that mote of dust, turned an engineering afterthought into a piece of moral philosophy.

The three images make a progression that nobody planned. Earthrise shows a home seen from nearby. The Blue Marble shows a whole, filling the frame. The Pale Blue Dot takes the object away almost entirely, and leaves you looking at the space where it would be. Each is further from us, and each asks for more interpretation. By the third, the caption is doing nearly all the work.

When pictures become routine

Beginning in 2015, a camera on the DSCOVR satellite, parked about 1.5 million kilometers away at a gravitational balance point between Earth and the Sun, began photographing the full sunlit face of the planet many times a day. The images are free, beautiful and almost entirely unremarked. A picture that once stopped the world came to refresh in a browser tab.

That is not a failure. Routine imagery is how we track ice sheets, wildfires, algal blooms and the growth of cities. Even the darkness is measured now, as in the composites of Earth’s lights at night. The pictures that matter most to science are rarely the ones that move people. It may be that an icon needs scarcity: one roll of film, one window, a few minutes of a passing orbit.

Looking back on purpose

Bill Anders died in 2024. He said of the flight that the crew had come all that way to explore the Moon, and the most important thing was that they discovered the Earth. It is worth remembering that the decision to look back has always been deliberate: a roll of the spacecraft, a request for film, a scientist talking a mission manager into pointing a camera away from its target. The pictures of home that changed us were all, in a sense, detours.

Sources

• NASA Scientific Visualization Studio: Earthrise reconstruction
• NASA: DSCOVR EPIC image archive
• NASA Science: Voyager mission overview