Apollo 17's crew shot the Blue Marble, Earth's most famous portrait
On this day · 7 December 1972
On the way to the Moon, the last lunar crew captured a fully lit Earth that reshaped how we see our planet.
On December 7, 1972, roughly five hours after launch and about 29,000 kilometers out, the crew of Apollo 17 turned a camera back toward home and photographed Earth as a complete, fully illuminated sphere.
The alignment was rare luck. The Sun sat almost directly behind the spacecraft, lighting the whole disk, and the trajectory finally let a crew capture the Antarctic ice cap alongside Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. The image, catalogued as AS17-148-22727, was taken with a 70-millimeter Hasselblad camera and an 80-millimeter lens. Later analysis credits geologist-astronaut Harrison Schmitt, though it cannot be settled for certain.
Apollo 17 was the final crewed mission to leave low Earth orbit, so it was also the last chance for human hands to take such a photo.
Cropped and rotated, the “Blue Marble” became one of the most reproduced images ever made.
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