Fifty years ago today Apollo 8 astronaut, Bill Anders, captured this iconic image. He was supposed to be shooting the moon but couldn’t resist. For some time after the mission, there had been confusion as to which astronaut had actually snapped this photo. Brown alum, and moon mission fanatic, Andrew Chaikin wrote about getting to the bottom of the mystery in Smithsonian magazine.
In today’s visually bombarded world it’s hard to imagine the immediate, global impact of that single image. The picture that came to be known as “Earthrise” offered a precious moment of transcendence after a year of violence and turmoil. The following year it was made into a U.S. postage stamp, and it adorned the cover of the Whole Earth Catalog. Walter Cronkite used it as a backdrop on the “CBS Evening News.” Wilderness photographer Galen Rowell called it “the most influential environmental photograph ever taken,” and it’s no accident that 16 months after we saw ourselves from the Moon, the first Earth Day took place.
But one question about the Earthrise photo has dogged historians for almost half a century: Who took it?
The astronauts themselves became mired in a Rashamon fog until Chaikin found . . . the tapes!
Chaikin has made something of a cottage industry out of the Apollo moon missions, writing several books on the topic, including A Man on the Moon. According to his bio, “Chaikin served on the Viking missions to Mars at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and was a researcher at the Smithsonian’s Center for Earth and Planetary Studies before becoming a science journalist in 1980.” You had me at Viking . . .