It was Christmas Eve 1968. Apollo 8 was the first NASA mission to go into orbit around the moon. As the astronaut crew looked out the window of their space capsule, they witnessed something never seen before: the rise of Earth.
Mission commander first took a black-and-white photograph. Fellow astronaut William Anders decided the image needed to be captured in color. The resulting photograph became an image of how we view our place in the vastness of space.
When Apollo 8 returned to Earth on December 27, technicians couldn’t wait to view the image that had so inspired the astronauts. They drove four hours to an available film processing lab. The resultant image is shown below:
The image became known as Earthrise. It became viral when viral only referred to diseases. Major newspapers and magazines featured it on their covers. Earthrise gave the world a sense of wonder.
This was in 1968. The images in our collective minds at that time were a Vietnamese general preparing to kill a soldier, a busboy holding the body of Robert Kennedy, and civil rights leaders pointing to the assassin of Martin Luther King, Jr. Earthrise gave us a life perspective that we desperately needed. Countries seemed to be simply land masses. The world seemed so much more vulnerable yet majestic. World conflicts seemed trivial when viewed from the vastness of space. Earth became a place we call home, and we became much more aware of the need to protect it.
Just imagine the wonder that images can project. Might there be an image that helps us understand the good in each of us? What kind of image can help us understand the importance of being caregivers? And how might we capture images of each of us making a difference in the society where we live?
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“We came all this way to explore the Moon,
and the most important thing is
that we discovered the Earth”—William Anders