Earthrise

• 1. Introduction

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  Earthrise is a photograph of Earth taken from lunar orbit by astronaut William Anders on the 24th of December, 1968, during the Apollo 8 mission. At the moment of its capture, at 16:39:39.3 UTC, no human had ever seen the Earth from this vantage point with their own eyes. The mission had set out to orbit the Moon. What Anders photographed instead would outlast the mission itself, and wilderness photographer Galen Rowell would later call it the most influential environmental photograph ever taken. How did a single frame of Ektachrome film, shot in under a second at 1/250th of a second exposure, come to carry that weight? And who actually took it?

• 2. The Disputed Shutter

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  Frank Borman, the mission commander of Apollo 8, claimed for years that he took the first Earthrise photograph. A black-and-white reproduction appeared in his 1988 autobiography with the caption: "One of the most famous pictures in photographic history, taken after I grabbed the camera away from Bill Anders." Borman noted that this was the image the Postal Service used on a stamp, and few photographs had been more frequently reproduced. The cloud patterns in that black-and-white image, however, differ from the image that became known as Earthrise. Borman later recanted. The evidence came from transcripts and a video produced by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio employee Ernie Wright. Anders, Borman confirmed, took all three photographs. The mission audio tape establishes that several photographs were taken on Borman's orders, with the enthusiastic agreement of Anders and Jim Lovell. After Anders took the first color shot, Lovell noted the exposure settings. Anders then took a second similar shot, catalogued as AS08-14-2384.

• 3. Camera and Film

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  Anders had been photographing the lunar surface with a 250 mm lens when Earth appeared in the window. He used that same lens for the Earthrise images, mounted on a highly modified Hasselblad 500 EL with an electric drive. The camera lacked a standard reflex viewfinder; instead it had a simple sighting ring. The film magazine held custom Ektachrome film developed by Kodak, sized at 70 mm. Borman described Anders as holding a master's degree in nuclear engineering, and noted that Anders was tasked as the scientific crew member also performing the photography duties that would be so important to the Apollo crew who actually landed on the Moon.

• 4. South Texas at Midnight

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  After Apollo 8 returned to Earth, NASA technicians could not wait for standard film processing. They drove four hours from Houston to Corpus Christi, Texas, to reach R&R Photo Studio and Color Labs, later known as R&R PhotoTechnics. At the time it was the first and only place in South Texas with color photo processing equipment, including a rare four-hour Ektachrome slide processing capability for the professional 220-size film used by the astronauts' Hasselblad. Owner Raul Rodriguez received the film, which had traveled roughly 500,000 miles to the far side of the Moon and back. Rodriguez developed the slides, copied them to regular 220 negatives, and printed the requested photos in 8" by 10" glossy size. For the slides and negatives, he used a German-made Merz S2A dual-rocking-drum developer. To print the first Earthrise photo, he used an Auto-focus Chromega D4 enlarger with modern dial-in color filters, seated on a motorized-drive roll-paper carrier. The images were processed through a self-replenishing continuous-feed roll-photo paper processor made by the Nord photo company, then based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Rodriguez returned the slides, negatives, and prints to the NASA technicians, who rushed them back to Houston.

• 5. Orientation and Legacy

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  The original image was rotated 95 degrees clockwise to produce the published Earthrise orientation, so that Earth appears to rise over the moonscape. In that published version, Earth is rotated roughly 135 degrees from the familiar north-south-pole perspective, with south to the left. The photograph became the cover image for the Spring 1969 issue of the Whole Earth Catalog. In Life's 2003 book 100 Photographs that Changed the World, Rowell restated his view of the photograph's influence. Another author described its appearance as the beginning of the environmental movement. On the 50th anniversary of taking the photo, Anders observed: "We set out to explore the moon and instead discovered the Earth." In October 2018, two craters visible in the photograph were named Anders' Earthrise and 8 Homeward by the Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature of the International Astronomical Union, having previously carried only letter designations.

• 6. Aftermath and Later Echoes

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  In 1969, the U.S. Postal Service issued a stamp commemorating the Apollo 8 mission, Scott number 1371, featuring a detail of the Earthrise photograph alongside the words "In the beginning God...", recalling the Genesis reading the crew broadcast during the mission. In 2013, for the 45th anniversary of Apollo 8, NASA released a computer-generated visualization built from data supplied by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. The video was synchronized with the crew's recorded conversation and was led by Ernie Wright, the same NASA Goddard employee whose research had settled the authorship dispute. The reconstruction confirmed that all photographs of the rising Earth on Apollo 8's fourth orbit were taken by Anders. Joni Mitchell drew on the image in her 1976 song "Refuge of the Roads", singing about a photograph of the Earth taken coming back from the Moon, noting "you couldn't see a city / On that marbled bowling ball / Or a forest or a highway / Or me here least of all." On the 50th anniversary, Anders also reflected that the photograph had undercut his religious beliefs, and he described becoming a close intellectual ally of scientist Richard Dawkins. In May 2026, a main belt asteroid discovered at the Catalina Sky Survey on the 24th of December, 1998, the 30th anniversary of the photograph, was named in connection with Earthrise.

• 7. The Artemis Return

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  Earthrise served as the visual basis for the 2026 Artemis II crewed lunar flyby mission patch, matched down to the specific cloud patterns in the photograph. The mission's zero-gravity indicator, named Rise, was also designed after the photograph. On the 6th of April, 2026, crew member Christina Koch took a new photograph during Artemis II's lunar flyby, titled Earthset, using a Nikon D5 camera. The original photograph had been taken by a human seeing an earthrise for the first time; the previous examples had been captured robotically and in black-and-white by the Lunar Orbiter program in 1966.