Little marble

Someone told me the other day that she liked the image I used for my previous post: a full moon. No, I didn’t take that photo myself. It was taken from the CD cover of an album I like very much.

Today, I’d like to show you another photo, a reverse shot: it’s how the Earth looks from the moon. What a beautiful blue marble!

It is sometimes difficult to believe almost no one had seen how the earth looked like from space until 1968.

In December 1968, Apollo 8, the first manned spacecraft to orbit the moon, sent back the iconic image of “earth rise” – the image of the earth rising from the barren horizon of the moon.

Before that, NASA did obtain satellite images of our planet from space, but those images were not released to the public, for reasons that only made sense during the Cold War, despite a campaign led by Stewart Brand.

So, it was not until December 1968 could people have the first glimpse of what their home really looked like.

40 years have passed. In April 2008, the Japanese moon satellite Kaguya took the above footage using its HD video camera. It’s the footage of the so-called “full earth-rise” – you can see the whole earth, not just part of it. There are only two times (April and September) a year you can see that, if you are living on the moon.

I love this footage. Even now, after having seen this footage about 150 times, I am still a bit tearful when I watch it.

I have been following the Kaguya mission closely since it was launched in October 2007 (OK, I am a nerd and I love space missions). And in the past two weeks, I read a lot about the Apollo 8 mission. Apollo 8 was less historic than Apollo 11 (the first moon landing), less tragic than Apollo 1 (the fire!), and less exciting than Apollo 13 (Tom Hanks!). But it was Apollo 8 that gave us the first photo of earth rise.

The legend has it that within 100 days after the release of this image, the environmental movement began. It’s this image of the beautiful, fragile blue marble that triggered off the first call for protecting the planet from ourselves.

These two images of the earth are the bookmarks of my life so far. In 1968, the year I was born, my father was 40 years old (he was born in 1928). He saw the image of the earth for the first time. In 2008, I was 40 years old. I saw the motion picture of earth rise for the first time. In between, many things happened. Like, I was born.

Sitting on the moon, we see this trivial but strangely beautiful planet rises and set like clockwork. 40 years have passed. Nothing really changes. Meanwhile, some people are born, some are dead. Some fall in love, some fall out of love.

We live.

Watching the footage of the earth rising silently from the moon horizon, I can’t help but think: how absolutely wonderful to be alive. And how amazing to be alive at the same time with my fellow earth-dwellers. Our lives are so short – what are the chances of us co-existing on this planet at the same time?

You can read more about the first earth image here. You can follow the Kaguya mission here. Read more about Stewart Brand, the father of the “Whole Earth Catalogue”, and his campaign to release the image of our planet here.

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