Lunar Orbiter 1 took the first photo of Earth from the Moon
On this day · 23 August 1966
A spacecraft sent to scout Apollo landing sites swung around and, almost on a whim, shot the first Earthrise.
On 23 August 1966, NASA’s Lunar Orbiter 1 snapped the first photograph of Earth as seen from the Moon. The probe had launched on August 10 with a strictly practical job: map smooth, safe ground for the coming Surveyor and Apollo landings.
The Earth portrait was not in the plan. On its 16th orbit, just before slipping behind the Moon, controllers turned the camera to catch our planet hanging over the gray lunar horizon — a half-lit Earth stretching, in that frame, from roughly Istanbul to Cape Town.
Two and a half years before Apollo 8’s color “Earthrise,” a robot got there first.
The original 1966 image was grainy and low in contrast. In 2008, the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project at NASA’s Ames Research Center coaxed the original analog data off decades-old tapes using restored vintage drives, recovering a far sharper view than the public ever saw at the time.
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