Five photos of Earth from space that make us see how special it is
5x5 It’s 50 years since the Earth was first photographed from beyond a low orbit. For all the thousands of planets we’re continuing to find around other stars, it’s the only one we know that supports life, let alone intelligence. And if someone asks why we ‘waste’ money on space when there’s so much wrong on Earth, then a very good answer is that these humbling images pretty-much kick-started the modern environmental movement.
1 The Forgotten Earthrise: Lunar Orbiter 1 Apollo 8’s colour photo of Earth is the one everyone remembers, but in 1966 NASA took a gamble and rotated their first moon orbiter so that it could catch the Earth as it came around from the Far Side of the Moon. They weren’t sure if they’d be able to spin it back around to continue taking photos of the lunar surface, and Boeing engineers advised against it. The whole thing was a work in progress: previous missions in low orbit had developed their photos when they got back, but LO1 wasn’t coming back and NASA needed high resolution pictures of the surface for the Apollo missions, so it travelled with a huge 70mm camera and an automated suite which developed, scanned and transmitted the photos. They’ve since been digitally enhanced, but I prefer this grainy paste-up of scans and printouts.
2 The star shot: Apollo 8 Despite the 1966 shot, the crew of Apollo 8 weren’t briefed or ready for Earthrise when they sped around the Moon on Christmas Eve in 1968. They were supposed to test the Lunar Module in Earth orbit in early 1969, but when it wasn’t ready the mission was brought forward to become the first manned flight out of low Earth orbit and around another celestial body. When they saw Earth come up, Bill Anders had to hurry to get a colour film. Audio from the moment reminds us that though they had The Right Stuff to keep calm under pressure, they were still very human:
Anders: Oh my God! Look at that picture over there! There’s the Earth coming up. Wow, is that pretty.
Borman: Hey, don’t take that, it’s not scheduled. (joking)
Anders: (laughs) You got a color film, Jim?
Hand me that roll of color quick, would you…
Lovell: Oh man, that’s great!
3 The Blue Marble: Apollo 17 Speeding to the Moon, 45,000 kilometres away, the crew of Apollo 17 were ready for the view, and took this full-frame photo of Earth. Humans haven’t travelled more than a few hundred kilometres above our planet since then, so this was the last time that a human photographer was able to take a picture like this, and that’s a sobering thought in its own. The astronauts unpatriotically photographed Africa, but NASA was able to correct this egregious error with the Blue Marble 2012 image of the Western hemisphere, although this is a composite of images from just over 800km up. QI fact: the original image has Antartica at the top, but then what’s up in space?
4 The Black Marble: Earth by night Light pollution is a major problem, as any astronomer will tell you, and NASA’s SUOMI-NPP mapped the world using a camera which detects visible and near infra-red light to create an image of the world’s light output at night. Filtering techniques observe man-made light such as city lights and gas flares, as well auroras, wildfires, and reflected moonlight. The black marble is compiled from images taken in 2012, and shows that man-made lights dominate the natural, creating a dim glow across much of the inhabited world.
5 The Pale Blue Dot: Voyager 1 One of the final images taken by the Voyager 1 space probe captured the Earth from six billion kilometres away — that’s 40 times the distance of the Earth from the Sun—far beyond the orbits of any planets. The crescent Earth is a tiny dot, just 0.12 pixel across, almost outshone by refracted light from the nearby Sun. The astronomer Carl Sagan convinced NASA to take a sequence of photos of the solar system before the probe’s cameras were turned off in 1990 so that it could preserve its remaining power for instruments to measure electrical and magnetic phenomena on the outskirts of the Solar System. It inspired his book, Pale Blue Dot, a call for humanity to both nurture our home and live responsibly beyond it. He wrote:
Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
