Earth divulges its true state as oceanic and atmospheric, warmly welcoming and achingly vulnerable. But look closer and that spherical perfection softens a little. At first glance it seems to have the sheen of blue-veined marble.
SPACE ART VIEW FROM A PLANET SURFACE PATCH
Earth looks as if it is floating alone in the eternal night of space, each part awaiting its share of the life-giving light of the sun.Īpart from a small brown patch of equatorial Africa, the planet is blue and white. The line dividing night and day severs Africa. Slightly more than half the planet is illuminated. The Earth pictured in Earthrise looks unlike traditional cartographic globes that mark out land and sea along lines of latitude and longitude. The crew of the Apollo 8 spacecraft (Bill Anders, 3rd left) following the lunar orbital mission, 27 December 1968. With its incontestable beauty, a beauty that had needed no eye of a beholder for billions of years, it caught the human heart by surprise. “Earthrise”, though, did more than just corroborate this gathering mood. It just happened that Apollo 8’s aim – to locate the best lunar landing sites – needed high-res photography, which was also good for taking pictures of planets a quarter of a million miles away.īrand was one of a group of environmental activists who felt that an image of “Spaceship Earth” would bring us all together in watchfulness and care for our planetary craft and its precious payload. But then looking back at Earth was itself a weird offshoot of the moon missions. Its one-world, eco ethos was a weird offshoot of the macho tech of the space age – those hunks of aluminium run on rocket fuel and cold war rivalries.
SPACE ART VIEW FROM A PLANET SURFACE MANUAL
The next edition, in spring 1969, used Anders’s photograph, by now known as Earthrise.īrand’s catalogue was a DIY manual for the Californian counterculture, a crowdsourced compendium of life hacks about backpacking, home weaving, tantra art and goat husbandry. A satellite had even taken a colour photo that, in the autumn of 1968, the radical entrepreneur Stewart Brand put on the cover of his first Whole Earth Catalog. Lunar probes had sent back crudely scanned images of a crescent Earth shrouded in cloud. This was not quite the first look at our world from space.
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