The Earthrise photograph is taken eight months before the first landing on the moon.
The Apollo8 mission carried astronauts Frank Borman, William Anders, and Jim Lovell into lunar orbit. It was the first occasion on which humans had traveled beyond the gravitational field of Earth to that of another body. Their task was to photograph the lunar surface, but as they rolled the spacecraft and came around the far side of the moon, they saw distant earth rising above the vast, inert surface of the moon. Both Borman, the mission commander, and Anders caught the moment on the film. Borman captured Earth in monochrome just as emerged over the lunar horizon; Anders with it risen a few degrees into the black sky, in color, a swirl of blue and white. The picture showed, for the first time, Earth from distant space, a small planet partly shrouded in darkness: a fragile, fluid, integrated world, fascinating and attractive, in contrast to the monolithic, gray, and inert moon, that Lovell described as "like plaster of Paris or grayish beach sand." he added, "the vast loneliness is awe-inspiring and makes you realize just what you have here on Earth."
In fact, because the moon keeps the same face continually turned on Earth, Earth does not "rise" or "set" from the surface, but remains at the same point in the sky permanently.
The Earthrise photograph was taken up by the developing environmental movement and proved a powerful graphics image for the notion, proposed by James Lovelock, of "Gaia," Earth as a self-correcting, almost intelligent organism.
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The Apollo8 mission carried astronauts Frank Borman, William Anders, and Jim Lovell into lunar orbit. It was the first occasion on which humans had traveled beyond the gravitational field of Earth to that of another body. Their task was to photograph the lunar surface, but as they rolled the spacecraft and came around the far side of the moon, they saw distant earth rising above the vast, inert surface of the moon. Both Borman, the mission commander, and Anders caught the moment on the film. Borman captured Earth in monochrome just as emerged over the lunar horizon; Anders with it risen a few degrees into the black sky, in color, a swirl of blue and white. The picture showed, for the first time, Earth from distant space, a small planet partly shrouded in darkness: a fragile, fluid, integrated world, fascinating and attractive, in contrast to the monolithic, gray, and inert moon, that Lovell described as "like plaster of Paris or grayish beach sand." he added, "the vast loneliness is awe-inspiring and makes you realize just what you have here on Earth."
In fact, because the moon keeps the same face continually turned on Earth, Earth does not "rise" or "set" from the surface, but remains at the same point in the sky permanently.
The Earthrise photograph was taken up by the developing environmental movement and proved a powerful graphics image for the notion, proposed by James Lovelock, of "Gaia," Earth as a self-correcting, almost intelligent organism.
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