“Earth Rise” – Astronauts Christmas In Space” December 24, 1968

We all remember the literary classic story “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” by Dylan Thomas. I submit that it is worth commemorating the story of “an astronauts Christmas around the moon” and “earth rise” by Bill Anders of NASA’s, Apollo 8

More than 50 years after it was shot, Earthrise continues to be seen as one of the most iconic environmental photographs ever taken.

On Christmas Eve, 1968 the crew of Apollo 8 captured a spectacular sight as they orbited the Moon: the illuminated Earth appearing above the barren lunar horizon.

The Nasa astronauts were awestruck by what they saw. Anders clicked the shutter and captured what has become one of the world’s most famous photographs

The image was coined “Earthrise”. It was the first colour photograph of Earth taken from space and quickly circulated around the world. The photo is widely credited with propelling the global environmental movement and leading to the creation of Earth Day, an annual event promoting environmental activism and awareness, in 1979

It was a bad day for Bill Anders when NASA took away his spacecraft and gave him a camera. The spacecraft was a nifty one: the spindly, four-legged lunar module that would ferry two members of a three-man Apollo crew down to the surface of the moon while the third member minded the Apollo mothership in orbit overhead. Anders was a rookie astronaut, a member of the newest class of recruits, and in the run-up to the Apollo missions he knew it was unlikely he would ever get to command a lunar module; but if he learned every little thing there was to know about the machine — making himself as much of an expert as the people who designed it.

But in the summer of 1968, those plans got turned upside down. Word from the lunar-module manufacturer was that the ship would not be ready for flight until sometime in 1969. The decision was thus made that Borman, Lovell and Anders crew, the crew of Apollo 8, would fly anyway with what they had — the Apollo orbiter alone — and take it to the place it was designed to go in the first place: the moon.

Borman was thrilled at the chance to beat the Soviet Union into lunar orbit, scoring a key win in the Cold War. Lovell, who was never quite so happy as when he was in space, saw the mission as the stuff of Lewis and Clark. Anders, a lunar-module pilot with no lunar module, could muster no such enthusiasm. His role on this flight would now be to serve as the mission’s photographer and cartographer;. Still, Anders could not help but feel that his contribution to the landmark mission in which human beings would at last reach the moon would be minimal. He was wrong.

None of the men had thought about what that would mean — that when they came around from the far side of the moon and once again prepared to establish a straight line of radio communication between them and the Earth, there would also be a straight line of sight. That meant they could watch, at last, as their home planet rose above the bleak lunar plains.

“Oh, my God!” Borman suddenly said. “Look at that picture over there! Here’s the Earth coming up. Wow, is that pretty!”

It was Anders who shook himself from his reverie first, struggling to remove his black and white film magazine from his camera and replace it with something that would better capture what he was seeing. “Hand me that roll of color, quick,” he said to Lovell,

But only one of the pictures would be the one that mattered.. Only now, on Christmas Eve day, 1968, nobody knew it. SOURCE: B.B.C. and Time Magazine