The story of the Apollo 8 Earthrise photograph: the crew of the first mission to the Moon, the Christmas Eve 1968 frame taken by William Anders that showed humans the whole Earth for the first time, and what the image teaches a player about dating a 1968 photograph.
Earthrise is the colour view of the whole Earth hanging above the grey horizon of the Moon, taken by the Apollo 8 crew in December 1968. It has been called one of the most reproduced and most influential photographs ever made — a single frame that, in the earliest days of the environmental movement, let everyone on Earth actually see the planet as a place. It is also, for the story the archive tells, one of the cleanest examples of a photograph that could only have been taken in the exact moment it was: a hand-held image of the full Earth from the Moon's vicinity simply did not exist before crewed lunar flight began.
Apollo 8 was the first crewed mission to leave Earth's orbit and fly to the Moon. The three-man crew — Commander Frank Borman, Command Module Pilot Jim Lovell and Lunar Module Pilot William Anders — launched on 21 December 1968 and entered lunar orbit on Christmas Eve. This was the mission whose astronauts broadcast the famous Genesis reading from lunar orbit, watched live by tens of millions of people on the night of 24–25 December 1968. No human had ever been so far from their own planet, and no photograph taken from that distance existed until the crew of Apollo 8 made one.
The famous image was not planned. On the mission's fourth orbit around the Moon, as the spacecraft came out from behind the lunar far side, the crew looked up to find Earth rising above the grey lunar horizon. There are slightly different recollections of the few seconds that followed, but the shape is consistent: the opportunity was brief, the crew scrambled to capture it, and the colour frame that the whole world would come to know was taken by William Anders, who had loaded a magazine of colour film on a 70mm Hasselblad with an 80mm lens. He made a small sequence of exposures across those seconds; the image now reproduced as Earthrise is the one everyone remembers.
Almost everyone has seen a version of Earthrise with a band of lunar surface along the bottom and the Earth floating upright just above it. What came out of the camera was different: as shot, the frame had the Moon's horizon running diagonally with Earth toward one corner. The familiar vertical composition is a rotation that later reproduction settled on. It is a small reminder of a theme that runs through the whole archive — that the photographs we think we know reach us curated and re-turned, cropped and rotated and captioned, not always exactly as they left the camera. Reading a photograph is partly reading those choices.
Before December 1968, no person had looked at the whole Earth from the Moon's neighbourhood and come back to describe it. The Earthrise image arrived precisely as the modern environmental movement was gathering force, and it is widely credited with helping turn a diffuse concern into something personal — many accounts name it among the most influential environmental photographs ever taken. Within eighteen months came the first Earth Day, in April 1970, and later that same year the United States created its Environmental Protection Agency. The view from Apollo 8 is routinely pointed to as one of the reasons the fragile, single, whole Earth became a symbol.
For a guessNow player Earthrise is a near-perfect lesson in bracketing by evidence — the historian's habit of asking what the newest thing in a picture is, because the newest thing sets the floor under a date. Here the newest thing is the whole photo itself: a colour image of the full Earth disc taken by a person from the Moon's vicinity was technically impossible until crewed lunar flight, which began only in December 1968. So the frame can be dated almost to the month — late 1968 at the earliest — without knowing anything about the mission. Every other clue agrees: it is unmistakably a mid-century photograph of a certain kind, shot on real colour film with a medium-format camera, carrying the grain and tones of the late-sixties space programme. Bracket it by the newest thing, and a photograph with no caption still reads as 'around 1968'. The date range in the game holds even a player who has never seen the Apollo 8 archive.
The photograph is one of the rounds in guessNow's archive. It arrives revealed piece by piece, and you slide to the year you think it was taken before your HP runs out — see whether you can read it down to 1968, or at least to the space age. For the broader cues in a late-sixties frame — the film era, the photographic technology, the clothing and design of the day — our how to date a 1960s photograph guide walks through the tells in detail.