Three men float in tight confinement, separated and shielded from cold and vacuum by layers of aluminum and steel.
Outside is outer space, the moon a cracked gray canvas directly below. It’s Christmas Eve, 1968, and the three men – NASA’s Apollo 8 astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders – are about to complete their fourth rotation around Earth’s satellite aboard their spacecraft. It’s why they’re here, the whole point of the Apollo 8 mission; a crewed attempt at orbiting Luna before returning safely to Earth. Landings and small steps for man will come later, but this trio of astronauts need to see about getting there first.
Anders watches the drab, scarred landscape pass by, a Hasselblad camera boasting a 250 mm telephoto lens in his hands. Another Hasselblad is mounted “in Borman’s front-facing window, the so-called rendezvous window, photographing the Moon on an automatic timer: a new picture every twenty seconds,” a passage from the NASA website reads.
As Borman turns the craft, Anders sees something ascend on the lunar horizon – a pop of blue, white and green that stains the perfect darkness.
“Oh my God, look at that picture over there!” Anders says. “There’s the Earth comin’ up. Wow, is that pretty!”
There’s a scramble to take more pictures, almost a panic. The chance to capture such moments, photographers and videographers understand, is fleeting and limited, with no do-overs offered. In other words: get the shot.
Anders does.
The planet looks like a Christmas tree ornament, according to Rocket Men, Robert Kurson’s book on the Apollo 8 mission. Details and boundaries are impossible to see, all of humanity – save for three – squeezed into a tiny space in Anders’ camera lenses. Later, Anders, Borman and Lovell will take turns reading verses 1 through 10 from the “Book of Genesis” in the Bible, out loud, the words beaming from their spacecraft into living room televisions and radios around the world.
“In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep.”
As they continue, another similarly lifeless landscape – almost an earth without form, and void – continues to pass below them.
Later, back on Earth, Anders’ wife Valerie tells her children, “That was for the whole world.”
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When the trio of astronauts arrived back at home, NASA developed numerous photos, including Anders’ Earthrise photos, which would later inspire an official stamp from the U.S. Postal Service. President Lyndon B. Johnson sent copies of one image to world leaders, and the Hasselblad camera company attempted to gift Anders a new camera, which he refused, according to Rocket Men.
Less than two years later, the U.S. celebrated its first Earth Day, with an estimated 20 million people participating, according to the Earth Day website. Earthrise served as a “catalyst” for the occasion.
“By the end of the year, the United States government created the Environmental Protection Agency and passed trailblazing environmental legislation like the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, National Environmental Education Act, and more,” the site reads. “William Anders and his photograph lives on through the environmental movement and the ever-growing participation and importance of Earth Day.”
There’s plenty more to learn about environmental policy beyond that brief passage. For a list of books in our collection on the subject, click here.
Earthrise’s impact continues to resonate. A 2003 edition of Life magazine, “100 Photographs That Changed The World,” listed it among a host of other famous images that included a 1903 photo of the Wright Brothers’ first successful airplane flight, a 1945 image depicting a cloud rising from the just-detonated atomic bomb over Nagasaki, Japan, and the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger explosion.
“It’s just the perfect image. It was a colour and good high-resolution image that could be reproduced really well and it provided a perspective of the Earth that had never been seen before,” Michael Pritchard, programmes director at the Royal Photographic Society in the UK, said of Earthrise in the BBC article ‘The 1968 photo that changed the world.’
“It clearly showed the Earth from space but also put it into a context that we hadn’t seen before,” he added “It showed that Earth was this very vulnerable sphere in space.”
Another photo of the Earth, 1972’s “The Blue Marble,” is also on the Life magazine list, courtesy of Apollo 17 astronauts as they embarked on their own lunar journey. This one is much more detailed and complete, a meticulous tapestry of white, blue, brown, and green.
Both images showed what 8 billion people would eventually call home, you and me included.
All of us on one shared surface that, from a distance, looks like a marble on a playground blacktop. There’s a perspective and humility that comes with such a vantage point; a reminder of how massive and simultaneously fragile our home has always been.
For a list of books on the societal and cultural impacts of photography and film, click here.
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Anders died almost a year ago in a plane crash near the San Juan Islands in Washington state. He was 90.
His legacy includes many accomplishments, but his captured views of the Earth from hundreds of thousands of miles away as it rose over a gray, scarred horizon endures for all of us to see.
“He not only saw new things but inspired generation upon generation to see new possibilities and new dreams – to voyage on Earth, in space, and in the skies,” a statement from NASA administrator Bill Nelson reads. “When America returns astronauts to the Moon under the Artemis campaign, and ultimately ventures onward to Mars, we will carry the memory and legacy of Bill with us.”