Earthrise. Der Guardian erinnert daran, wie am 24. Dezember 1968 dieses Foto entstanden ist.

„Forty years ago this Christmas the first human beings reached the moon. But their historic feat is better remembered for an image of what they left behind – planet Earth.

Looking back from more than 200,000 miles away, the crew of Apollo 8 saw Earth floating “like a Christmas tree ornament lit up in space, fragile-looking”. They pointed their cameras through smeared porthole windows and began snapping. It seems almost incredible now, but nobody thought to take a photo of Earth until they saw it, because nobody had seen it before.

One of those photos, an Earthrise over the grey and inhospitable lunar horizon, has become one of the most reproduced and recognised pictures of our planet. LIFE magazine selected it as one of 100 photographs that changed the world; more recently it featured in an Oscar-winning film about climate change, An Inconvenient Truth.

“That one picture exploded in the consciousness of humans,” said Al Gore, the film’s Nobel prize-winning narrator and campaigner. “It led to dramatic changes. Within 18 months of this picture the environment movement had begun.” “

Mehr im Apollo 8 Flight Journal. Via Wortfeld.