Emily Lakdawalla • Nov 20, 2007
Seeing Earth rise and set from the Moon
A reader wrote me to comment that the press release associated with Kaguya's pictures of Earthrise and Earthset contained a couple of inaccuracies that have since been repeated around the Internet. The fist is that Apollo 8 was not the first mission to image an Earthrise over the Moon -- the first was Lunar Orbiter 1 in 1966. There is a new and absolutely wonderful online archive of Lunar Orbiter images at the Lunar and Planetary Institute, so I went there to dig out these photos. Lunar Orbiter shot its images by scanning onto film that was developed inside the spacecraft, and then scanned line by line and returned to Earth as, I believe, an analog signal; you can see the striping of the original film strips on every image. Each Lunar Orbiter image has a medium-resolution context view, with a strip of three high-resolution views down the middle. Here's the medium- and then high-resolution views of the first-ever Earthrise over the Moon.