Short answers, pulled from the story.
NASA credits photographs to the entire crew, so all three Apollo 17 astronauts, Gene Cernan, Ronald Evans, and Harrison Schmitt, are listed. Evidence examined by researcher Eric Hartwell after the mission suggests Schmitt was the photographer; in a 2013 interview Schmitt described the camera settings and said his interest in amateur meteorology motivated the shot.
The Blue Marble was taken on the 7th of December 1972, at 05:39 a.m. EST, from roughly 29,400 kilometers above Earth's surface, aboard the Apollo 17 spacecraft en route to the Moon. The shot came about 5 hours and 6 minutes after the mission launched.
Harrison Schmitt used a 70-millimeter Hasselblad 500 EL camera with an 80-millimeter Zeiss planar lens. The film stock was Kodak SO-368 Ektachrome, and the shutter speed was set to 1/250 of a second.
The image shows Earth from the Mediterranean Sea to Antarctica, with almost the entire coastline of Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, Madagascar, most of the Indian Ocean, the South Asian mainland, and Australia on the eastern edge. A Shapyro-Keyser cyclone appears near the center, and Cyclone Sixteen is visible in the upper right. Cloud cover accounts for about 50 percent of the image.
The photograph was released during a surge in environmental activism in the 1970s, and it was adopted as a symbol of Earth's fragility and isolation in space. Poet-diplomat Abhay Kumar later wrote an Earth anthem inspired by it, and the phrase "blue marble" has been used by environmental activist organizations and companies promoting an environmentally conscious image.
Blue Marble 2012 is a composite image of the Western Hemisphere released by NASA on the 25th of January 2012, assembled from data gathered by the VIIRS instrument aboard the Suomi NPP satellite. Robert Simmon is most notable for his visualization, and the image logged over 3.1 million views on Flickr within its first week of release.
In April 2026, Artemis II commander Reid Wiseman photographed the full Earth disk from the window of the Orion Integrity spacecraft, making it the first such image taken by a human since The Blue Marble in 1972. NASA titled the photograph Hello, World.