Earth is shown tipped on its side in the Earthrise photo Antarctica is the white area to the left the sunlight boundary crosses Africa lunar horizon was a brilliant blue-and-white marble Earth The cabin of the spacecraft filled with excited voices as the astronauts scrambled to grab their cameras Borman exclaimed Oh my God Look at that picture over there Here’s the Earth coming up Wow that is pretty With Earth rising quickly Borman and Anders asked Lovell to pass them rolls of color film Lovell caught a view of his home planet too saying Oh man that’s great Take several of them He reached for another
camera and began snapping away One of Anders’s shots would become one of history’s most famous photos Earthrise Borman later remembered how he felt the instant he saw the incredible sight out the window of the spacecraft I happened to glance out of one of the still-clear windows just at the moment the Earth appeared over the lunar horizon It was the most beautiful heart-catching sight of my life one that sent a torrent of nostalgia of sheer homesickness surging through me It was the only thing in space that had any color to it Everything else was either black or white but not the Earth Three days later the command module streaked into Earth’s atmosphere at more than 24,000 miles per hour 38,600 kmh After shedding most of this speed through air resistance during its descent it parachuted to a soft landing in the Pacific Ocean The aircraft CAMERA EQUIPMENT ON APOLLO 8 The Apollo 8 mission carried two Hasselblad EL cameras These models were outfitted with electric motors that automatically wound the film to the next frame after a shot saving the astronauts valuable time The astronauts had three lenses for the cameras two regular lenses and one telephoto lens that could take close-up photos of distant objects Also included were seven magazines or self-contained rolls of film Three were black-and-white film and four were color The color magazines could shoot 160 photos each and the black-and-white ones could shoot 200
The Apollo 8 capsule was recovered on December 27 1968 carrier USS Yorktown picked up the astronauts and they returned to the United States So too did their film Earthrise Returns to Earth At the Manned Spaceflight Center in Houston Texas Apollo photography director Richard Underwood was responsible for processing the images In a time long before digital cameras became mainstream film had to be treated with chemicals in order to produce usable photographs When the rolls of film from Apollo 8 arrived in Houston the original negatives were immediately copied and
A view of Earth captured by the Apollo 8 crew rear of photo was broadcast on a television in the mission operations control room on December 25 placed into a secure vault as backups Then the lab began turning the raw negatives into finished photographs Before the mission Underwood had foreseen the importance of a photo of Earth rising over the lunar horizon I argued hard for a shot of Earthrise and we had impressed upon the astronauts that we definitely wanted it As soon as he saw the processed photo he knew he had been right When I actually saw the picture after they returned it it was even better than I had anticipated Underwood wasn’t the only one to recognize the photo’s significance Of the hundreds of photos shot on Apollo 8 Earthrise drew by far the most attention The image was soon featured
