This is an odd pop phenomenon I’ve noticed, but haven’t seen anyone else ever comment on.
How do you depict the Earth and Clouds, seen from far away from the earth?
Nowadays, you show the earth as a blue-brown-white ball of oceans and continents and ice, closely sheathed with a thin covering of clouds. But, prior to about 1960, it was almost never depicted that way (at least outside of science fiction). Instead, the earth was shown as a cloud-free sphere, just like a classroom globe, with the clouds just sort of floating freely in space, as if normal clouds were a normal interplanetary phenomenon not subject to the usual rules of gravity. In fact, it was frequently depicted this way even in science fiction movies.
Examples are The Invisible Ray (from the 1930s), where we see the fall of a meteorite from a point of view outside the earth. The slowly turning globe has absolutely no clouds. There arn’t any in space, either.
Casablanca, where the globe shown at the beginning is swathed in clouds
The Day the Earth Stood Still. at the beginning we approach the earth , and see it from Klaatu’s POV. There are no clouds on the earth, but there are plenty of them between the earth and the moon.
This Island Earth – again, no clouds in space, but the Earth is cloud-free.
I had school textbooks from the 1950s period that showed the Earth surrounded by magical, gravity-defying clouds that extended well away from the earth.
The truth is that there really wasn’t a good reason for this. People knew better. Frank Kelly Freas and other SF cover illustrators showed the earth with a close-fitting mantle of cloud cover, and none in space. The movie Forbidden Planet gets another vote from me as Greatest Sf Film for getting this right, too – Altair IV has close-fitting cloud cover
the motion picturess shot by rockets on test flights from the period show the proper cloud cover, and weather satellite photos (which we got on the news every night during the 1960s) showed the earth as a ball with close-fitting ubiquitous cloud cover.
But Pop Culture representations of the earth continued to show it cloud-free for the most part, with those unscientific clouds out in space. Until the Apollo flights. There were images of the earth shot from far away that showed those dramatic cloud layers. In particular, there was the shot showing Earthrise over the Moon that was widely reproduced, and even made into a popular poster.*
It seems that ever since then the Earth and its clouds have been properly presented in pictures and the movies, and you don’t see the cloudless earth with space-faring clouds (although you’ll still see unscientific nebulae too damned close to the earth – I think artists feel that space is too barren, and needs something to make it visually interesting)
but it amazes me how the true image of a cloud-wrapped Earth made so little headway until that Apollo poster brought it home. Did the makers of movies think that the rubes in Sheboygan wouldn’t think it was the Earth, or that it didn’t look right with the clouds, and wouldn’t accept it if shown properly?
*The movie 2001 showed the earth correctly, with its cloud blanket hugging close, and it came out about the same time as the iconic Apollo image. But this wasn’t a big part of the 2001 iconography – the images associated with the film emphasized the space wheel, the various ships, and the Monolith. The shots of the properly-clouded Earth weren’t major images associated with the film. Star Trek showed cloud-wrapped planets, too, and might have helped. Although the way they depcted orbits always bothered me.
