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QUICK FACTS
What it’s: The world’s first picture of Earth from the moon
Where it’s: Lunar orbit, about 239,000 miles (385,000 kilometers) from Earth
When it was shared: Aug. 23, 2025 (initially taken Aug. 23, 1966)
Humanity’s first have a look at Earth from the moon did not come till Aug. 23, 1966, when this grainy, black-and-white picture confirmed our planet as a crescent above the lunar horizon, showing to rise because the camera-toting spacecraft moved in orbit.
At the time, it was a landmark picture — and completely unplanned, in response to NASA. The first view of Earth from the moon got here from NASA’s Lunar Orbiter 1, which transmitted the picture to a monitoring station at Robledo De Chavela close to Madrid.
Lunar Orbiter 1, the primary U.S. spacecraft to orbit the moon, launched on an Atlas-Agena D rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on Aug. 10, 1966, and entered lunar orbit 4 days later. It was on a cartographic mission, designed to {photograph} doubtlessly protected touchdown websites on the moon for NASA’s Surveyor and Apollo missions, in response to NASA. Although the spacecraft’s digicam system wasn’t extremely detailed, it took way more detailed views from lunar orbit than had been potential from Earth by means of even the biggest telescopes on the time.
Lunar Orbiter 1’s digicam, manufactured by Eastman Kodak, featured an automatic system that developed uncovered movie, scanned the photographs, and transmitted them to Earth. The digicam was initially developed by the National Reconnaissance Office and was flown on the Cold War-era Samos spy satellites that had been launched by the U.S. within the Nineteen Sixties, in response to NASA.
Lunar Orbiter 1 orbited the moon for 76 days till it intentionally crashed into the moon on Oct. 29, 1966.
Related: James Webb telescope captures one of the deepest-ever views of the universe
Lunar Orbiter 1’s camera snapped photographs of nine potential Apollo landing sites and seven backup sites. Earth as a crescent was photographed Aug. 23, 1966, at 16:35 GMT, when the spacecraft was on its 16th orbit, moments before it passed into the darkness of the moon’s far side.
Over two years later, on Christmas Eve, 1968, Bill Anders, a lunar module pilot on Apollo 8, the first lunar orbit mission, snapped the iconic “Earthrise” photo. This higher-resolution color image captured humanity’s attention as a cultural milestone, but it was Lunar Orbiter 1’s very similar photo of Earth as a crescent rising behind the moon, taken over two years earlier, that was the technical first.
For more sublime space images, check out our Space Photo of the Week archives.
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