NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Brings "Earthrise" to Everyone
Released on April 19, 2012
On December 24, 1968, Apollo 8 Commander Frank Borman and crew members William A. Anders and James A. Lovell, Jr. became the first humans to photograph the Earth rising over the moon. Now, the rest of us can see what it was like in a new NASA visualization that draws on richly detailed maps of the moon's surface made from data gathered by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter!
The narration in this visualization comes from the original audio recording of the Apollo 8 astronauts. The flight time has been compressed for effect. The Earth in this visualization is not an exact duplication of what the astronauts saw but a mosaic of more recent images taken by Earth-observing satellites. Representative clouds were then layered on top of the mosaic.