The Blue Marble

• 1. Introduction

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  The Blue Marble is a photograph of Earth taken on the 7th of December 1972, by Harrison Schmitt aboard Apollo 17. Shot from roughly 29,400 kilometers above the surface, it captured nearly the entire face of an illuminated planet in a single frame. Africa glowed under noon sunlight. Antarctica was lit by the approaching December solstice. A cyclone churned in the Indian Ocean, and the Arabian Peninsula curved along the edge of the image like a fingerprint. To the astronauts looking out, the planet had the appearance and size of a glass marble.

  This image would go on to become one of the most reproduced pictures in history. But the story of how it came to exist, who actually took it, and what it unleashed in the decades that followed raises questions that take longer to answer than the fraction of a second it took to press the shutter.

• 2. Before the Shot

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  Stewart Brand had been campaigning since 1966 to force a reckoning. He believed NASA possessed a rumored satellite image of the entire Earth as seen from space, and he wanted it released to the public. His conviction was personal. During an LSD trip, he saw what he described as a psychedelic illusion of the Earth's curvature, and it persuaded him that a full image of the planet would fundamentally change how humans related to it. He printed buttons and sold them for 25 cents each, each one asking the same pointed question: "Why haven't we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?"

  Buckminster Fuller heard about the campaign and offered to help. Some of the buttons made their way to NASA employees. Brand eventually got what he was looking for, though not quite the image he had imagined. In 1968, he used a photograph taken by the ATS-3 satellite for the cover of his Whole Earth Catalog. That satellite image preceded The Blue Marble by several years, and it was already the kind of symbol Brand had wanted. The 1968 photograph Earthrise, taken by William Anders of Apollo 8, had also shown a full illuminated Earth from space. Apollo 17 would be the second crewed mission to achieve it, but the first with the geometry to photograph most of the southern hemisphere in full daylight, including the south polar ice cap, which had never been photographed from a mission trajectory before.

• 3. The Photograph Itself

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  Schmitt used a 70-millimeter Hasselblad 500 EL camera fitted with an 80-millimeter Zeiss planar lens. The film was Kodak SO-368 Ektachrome, and the shutter was set to 1/250 of a second. NASA's own record places the moment of capture at 05:39 a.m. EST, which was 10:39 UTC. That was 5 hours and 6 minutes after Apollo 17 launched, and about 1 hour and 54 minutes after the spacecraft left its parking orbit to begin its trajectory to the Moon.

  Researcher Eric Hartwell has proposed an alternative reading, suggesting the image was taken slightly earlier, at 5 hours and 3 minutes into the mission, around the time a crew member changed the f-number setting between AS17-148-22725, the first in the series, and the less exposed frames that followed. The photograph officially designated AS17-148-22727 is the third in that series of nearly identical shots.

  The image shows the Earth with about 50 percent cloud cover, including a Shapyro-Keyser cyclone near the center of the frame. Cyclone Sixteen, also labeled 16B, is visible in the upper right. That storm had already hit the Indian state of Tamil Nadu two days earlier, on the 5th of December, bringing flooding and high winds. The widely published version of the photograph was cropped, rotated so that south pointed upward relative to the capsule orientation, and chromatically adjusted from the original.

• 4. Who Pressed the Shutter

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  NASA's standard practice is to credit images to an entire mission crew rather than to any single individual. All three members of Apollo 17, Gene Cernan, Ronald Evans, and Harrison Schmitt, carried Hasselblad cameras and took photographs throughout the mission. Each of the three has, at various points, claimed to have taken The Blue Marble, and they have largely avoided giving a definitive answer as a group.

  Evidence examined by Eric Hartwell after the mission points toward Schmitt. In 2013, Schmitt gave a phone interview to the website The Phoblographer in which he discussed specific camera settings and explained that his motivation for taking the photograph came from his hobby as an amateur meteorologist. Weather prediction was, he said, a personal mission goal for him. He did not anticipate that the image would become so widely celebrated. The film itself was rescanned in 2007 by Arizona State University for their Apollo Image Archive, producing an extremely high-resolution raw version that researchers have been able to study in detail since.

• 5. Environmental Symbol

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  The photograph landed in a particular cultural moment. It was released during a surge in environmental activism that was building through the 1970s, and it was quickly adopted as a visual emblem for that movement. The image offered something that political arguments could not: a view of the planet as a single fragile object, surrounded by nothing.

  Poet-diplomat Abhay Kumar wrote an Earth anthem directly inspired by The Blue Marble. The lyric includes the line "all the peoples and the nations of the world, one for all, all for one, united we unfurl the blue marble flag." The phrase "blue marble" and the image itself have continued to circulate through environmental activism and through companies seeking to project an environmentally conscious identity. The image has also been used, more than fifty years after it was taken, to validate state-of-the-art atmospheric reanalysis models.

• 6. A Name Applied Forward

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  NASA eventually extended the Blue Marble name to a sequence of subsequent Earth imaging projects, each one building on advances in satellite technology. In 2002, NASA released a set of satellite imagery that included images at 1 km per pixel resolution, which was at that point the most detailed Earth imagery available for free reuse. One of those images became a default wallpaper on the first-generation iPhone in 2007.

  The 2005 release, named Blue Marble Next Generation, used automated image-sifting on photographs from NASA's Earth Observatory to produce a cloud-free image of the entire globe for each month from January to December 2004, at a resolution of 500 meters per pixel. That release captured seasonal changes in snow cover and vegetation that a single image could not reflect. A music visualization based on the texture data from that release was later made available for the PlayStation 3.

  On the 25th of January 2012, NASA released a composite image of the Western Hemisphere titled Blue Marble 2012. Robert Simmon is most notable for his visualization of that hemisphere. The image logged over 3.1 million views on the Flickr image hosting website within its first week of release. On the 2nd of February 2012, a companion image of the Eastern Hemisphere followed, using data obtained on the 23rd of January 2012. Both were assembled from data gathered by the Visible/Infrared Imager Radiometer Suite, known as VIIRS, aboard the Suomi NPP satellite. The Suomi NPP was named for satellite meteorology pioneer Verner Suomi.

• 7. Night, Space, and Critique

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  On the 5th of December 2012, during an annual meeting of Earth scientists held by the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, NASA released a nighttime counterpart called Black Marble. The images were assembled from data the Suomi NPP satellite gathered in April and October of that year. The satellite completed 312 orbits and acquired 2.5 terabytes of data to obtain a clear view of every parcel of Earth's land surface.

  The Black Marble images detect light across wavelengths from green to near-infrared, capturing city lights, gas flares, auroras, wildfires, and reflected moonlight. Researchers have used them to study the spatial distribution of economic activity, to select sites for astronomical observatories, and to monitor human activity around protected areas.

  Not all responses to the original Blue Marble have been celebratory. Critics have argued that the image and others taken from space distract from human geographic issues on the ground. Some scholars have framed it as a technological product of a dominant spacefaring country, one that presents an overview effect as a boundless, frictionless worldview, rather than as a prompt for careful and critical engagement with the planet's complexity.

  On the 6th of July 2015, the U.S. Deep Space Climate Observatory, known as DSCOVR, captured a new photograph of the sunlit Western Hemisphere centered over Central America. That satellite, launched in February 2015, provides a near-continuous view of the entire sunlit face of the Earth, uploading 13 new color images per day through the EPIC science team's website.

• 8. Hello, World

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  In April 2026, Artemis II commander Reid Wiseman photographed the full Earth disk from the window of the Orion Integrity spacecraft. It was the first image of a fully illuminated Earth disk taken by a person since The Blue Marble itself. Like the unrotated original from 1972, this photograph was taken with the South Pole facing upward.

  NASA's caption noted that two auroras are visible in the image, and that zodiacal light can be seen as the Earth eclipses the Sun. Wiseman used a Nikon D5 camera with a 14-24 mm f/2.8 lens set to an aperture of f/4, an exposure time of 1/4 second, and an ISO setting of 51,200. The image was later processed using Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic. NASA titled it Hello, World.