This NASA video describes the taking of the famous Earth-rise photo by the astronauts on Apollo 8 during their orbit of the Moon:
Caption:
In December of 1968, the crew of Apollo 8 became the first people to leave our home planet and travel to another body in space. But as crew members Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders all later recalled, the most important thing they discovered was Earth.
Using photo mosaics and elevation data from Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), this video commemorates the 45th anniversary of Apollo 8’s historic flight by recreating the moment when the crew first saw and photographed the Earth rising from behind the Moon. Narrator Andrew Chaikin, author of A Man on the Moon, sets the scene for a three-minute visualization of the view from both inside and outside the spacecraft accompanied by the onboard audio of the astronauts.
The visualization draws on numerous historical sources, including the actual cloud pattern on Earth from the ESSA-7 satellite and dozens of photographs taken by Apollo 8, and it reveals new, historically significant information about the Earthrise photographs. It has not been widely known, for example, that the spacecraft was rolling when the photos were taken, and that it was this roll that brought the Earth into view. The visualization establishes the precise timing of the roll and, for the first time ever, identifies which window each photograph was taken from.
The key to the new work is a set of vertical stereo photographs taken by a camera mounted in the Command Module’s rendezvous window and pointing straight down onto the lunar surface. It automatically photographed the surface every 20 seconds. By registering each photograph to a model of the terrain based on LRO data, the orientation of the spacecraft can be precisely determined.
The Mars One group so far has raised nearly $84,000 with its Indiegogo campaign and has 37 more days to reach their $400,000 goal. The funding will go towards the unmanned orbiter and lander projects they announced last week with Lockheed-Martin and Surrey Satelllite.
(Note that with Indiegogo, the fund-raising group can keep however much it raises as opposed to Kickstarter where the goal must be reached or exceeded to keep the pledged money.)
The European Space Agency’s Gaia observatory was put into space today by a Russian Soyuz rocket launched from the Arianespace facility in French Guiana. The goal of the mission:
Gaia will make the largest, most precise three-dimensional map of our Galaxy by surveying more than a thousand million stars.