— Ch. 1 · Apollo 17 Photography Event —
The Blue Marble.
~4 min read · Ch. 1 of 6
Harrison Schmitt stood inside the Apollo 17 spacecraft on the 7th of December 1972. He held a Hasselblad camera with an 80-millimeter Zeiss lens. The time was 05:39 a.m. EST when he pressed the shutter. Five hours and six minutes had passed since launch. The crew had just left Earth's parking orbit to begin their journey toward the Moon. Sunlight shone from above them while Earth hung below in the darkness of space. The resulting image showed Africa, Antarctica, and the Indian Ocean clearly. A cyclone named Sixteen (16B) appeared in the upper right corner. This storm had caused flooding in Tamil Nadu two days earlier. NASA assigned the photograph the official designation AS17-148-22727. It became the third shot in a series taken moments before and after this specific moment. Gene Cernan and Ronald Evans also took photos during the mission. All three astronauts later claimed credit for taking the famous picture. Interviews by Eric Hartwell suggested Schmitt was the actual photographer.
Environmental Movement Symbolism
Stewart Brand campaigned since 1966 to release a satellite image of the entire Earth. He sold buttons for 25 cents each that asked why humans had not seen such a photo yet. An LSD trip inspired his vision of the planet as a fragile sphere. Brand met Buckminster Fuller who offered help with his project. Pins made their way to NASA employees. The Apollo 17 image arrived during a surge in environmental activism during the 1970s. It depicted Earth's fragility, vulnerability, and isolation amid the vast expanse of space. The image became a symbol of the environmental movement. Stewart Brand used an ATS-3 satellite image from 1968 for his Whole Earth Catalog. That catalog included pictures of the whole planet as seen from space. The Blue Marble image helped change how humans related to their home planet. Today it remains one of the most widely distributed images in history according to NASA archivist Mike Gentry.