A View from beyond Our World

FRANK BORMAN for NASA = Earth Rise as Seen from Apollo 1968

Just before Christmas 1968, the world watched enthralled as the spacecraft Apollo 8 sped toward its rendezvous with the moon. On board the craft, in turn, astronauts Frank Borman, William Anders and James Lovell watched the earth, photographing it as it shrank into the distance. It was the first time that men had moved far enough out in space to see their own planet as a ce­lestial body-a marbled sphere of clouds, land and sea.

        The photograph at the right, taken by Borman with a Hasselblad fitted with a 250mm telephoto lens, shows the earth as it appeared from a distance of a quarter of a million miles, rising above the surface of the moon. Later the pic­ture would be carried on television, re­produced in thousands of newspapers and magazines, even made into a Unit­ed States postage stamp. Viewing it, earth-bound men shared with the astro­nauts a measure of their awe and a sense of man's insignificance in the vastness of space