Earthrise: Behind the Famed Apollo 8 Photo

Bill Anders racked up a lot of accomplishments in his 90-year life. But the fighter pilot, nuclear engineer, NASA astronaut and United States ambassador to Norway may be best remembered for a feat that took just 1/250 of a second.

On December 24, 1968, Anders photographed the Earth from the Apollo 8 spacecraft—an iconic image that has come to be known as "Earthrise."

Apollo 8 was the first crewed NASA mission to orbit the moon, a crucial step toward the moon landing by Apollo 11 astronauts in July 1969. Anders was one of three men on board, along with Frank Borman and Jim Lovell.

He was seated by a side window as their spacecraft emerged from behind the moon on its fourth orbit. The earth now became visible, appearing to rise over the crater-pocked surface of the moon, like a bright blue-and-white marble hovering in the stark, black vastness of space.

An on-board NASA recording caught his reaction: “Oh my God, look at that picture over there! There's the Earth comin’ up. Wow, is that pretty!”

Anders, who’d been taking pictures of the moon’s surface with a specially built Hasselblad camera, first captured the image in black and white, then asked Lovell to pass him some color film. Before the scene had receded from view, he managed to squeeze off two color shots. One of them would soon become famous as "Earthrise."

That night, Christmas Eve of 1968, the three astronauts held a live TV broadcast, reading from the Book of Genesis and sharing real-time video as they passed over the moon’s surface. Lovell commented: "The vast loneliness is awe-inspiring, and it makes you realize just what you have back there on Earth."

Technically, “Earthrise” wasn’t the first photo of the earth made from the vantage point of space. In 1946, an unmanned V-2 missile with a 35mm movie camera on board had earned that honor. Its images, shot at an altitude of 65 miles, were a breakthrough at the time but showed only a portion of the planet in fuzzy black and white. They were impressive—but hardly inspiring.

By contrast, “Earthrise” was crisp, colorful and showed the earth in its entirety, even if part of it was in shadow. After NASA released the photo to the press, it appeared in full color in countless newspapers and magazines all over the planet it pictured.

“The image would be widely credited with animating the environmental movement, which was just beginning to gather momentum in 1968 and became a global force within the year,” writes Jeffrey Kluger in his 2017 book Apollo 8: The Thrilling Story of the First Mission to the Moon.

In a 2018 book about the mission, Rocket Men, Robert Kurson reports that, “In case anyone had missed it, President Johnson sent a print of ‘Earthrise’ to every world leader.”

In a year of devastating images—from Martin Luther King Jr. felled on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel to Robert F. Kennedy dying in a busboy’s arms in a Los Angeles hotel—“Earthrise” offered a weary nation a collective moment of hope, pride and awe.

Anders left the astronaut ranks in 1969 for other duties, as did Borman in 1970. Lovell went on to command the 1970 Apollo 13 lunar mission, which nearly ended in tragedy after an oxygen tank explosion, a drama relived in the 1995 film Apollo 13.

Bill Anders reflected on his famous photo in a 1997 oral history, recalling his first impression of the earth as “this very delicate, colorful orb which to me looked like a Christmas tree ornament coming up over this very stark, ugly lunar landscape.”

Asked in the same interview if there was anything he’d wanted to accomplish on the mission but hadn’t, he could come up with only one example.

“In retrospect,” he replied. “I wish I would have taken more pictures.”