The Blue Marble image ignited a love of astrophotography that’s still going strong, 50 years later.
The crew of Apollo 17, Harrison H. Schmitt, Eugene A. Cernan, and Ron Evans, pose with a Lunar Roving Vehicle trainer.Fifty years ago, on December 7, 1972, NASA’s Saturn V rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, carrying the last of the Apollo-era astronauts to walk on the lunar surface.
Apollo 17—the sixth and final mission of NASA’s history-making initiative to land human explorers on the moon—was a scientific breakthrough: During their 75-hour lunar stay, crewmembers Eugene A. Cernan, Ronald E. Evans, and Harrison H. Schmitt collected rare types of lunar rock and samples of “orange soil,” or regolith, that once formed in a lunar volcanic eruption, indicating that the moon’s past eras of geologic activity lasted longer than previously thought—whichhas confirmed.
About five hours into the crew’s moon-bound journey, the shrinking sphere of our world drew someone’s gaze to the window. Upon seeing the beautiful, brightly illuminated Earth, a particularly astute astronaut grabbed hold of the onboard Hasselblad film camera and began snapping. Among those images was the one now known as the Blue Marble shot, the first photograph ever taken of the planet in its entirety.
Easily one of the most recognizable space images ever made, Blue Marble is the only picture of the entire, round Earth taken by human hands to date. It and those first few stunning images of our planet went on to inform how official space agency photographers arrange shots of Earth and other celestial bodies, and influenced the way we take and share images of space today.
When Blue Marble is compared to modern high-resolution pictures of Earth and other celestial entities delivered
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