The First Time We Saw Home
September 5, 2026 · by White Nights
On Christmas Eve, 1968, Apollo 8 was orbiting the moon — the first time humans had ever done so. Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders were circling 110 kilometres above the lunar surface, running through their orbital checklist, when the spacecraft rotated and Anders looked out his window.
He saw Earth rising over the lunar horizon.
He reached for a camera. Borman, thinking it was a distraction, told him to get back to the checklist. Anders said something to the effect that he was taking the picture regardless, and grabbed a roll of colour film from Lovell. The resulting photograph — a crescent of blue and white against the grey moonscape and absolute black of space — became known as Earthrise.
It is one of the most influential photographs ever made. Nature photographer Galen Rowell called it the most influential environmental photograph ever taken. It appeared on the covers of magazines around the world. It showed the Earth as a finite, fragile, impossibly beautiful object hanging in nothing — no borders, no nations, no divisions of any kind visible from that altitude.
The photograph arrived at a moment of particular turbulence: a year of assassinations, riots, and the ongoing Vietnam War. Seeing Earth whole and small and alone in darkness had an effect that was hard to articulate but easy to feel. Stewart Brand, who had been campaigning to get NASA to release a whole-Earth photograph for years, later said it shifted something fundamental in how people saw themselves in relation to the planet.
The crew read from Genesis on a live broadcast that night. It was Christmas Eve, and they were the furthest humans had ever been from home.